Present: Don Berger-chair, Bob Roth-parent, Denise Goodman-parent/staff member, Dot Rosenbaum-parent, Lori Mason-parent

Don Berger called the meeting to order at 4:00 p.m.

The committee received the final draft of the "Parent Guide to Your Role At Cary Academy". The pictures had been changed to better match the descriptions of the brochure. Other minor changes had been made as suggested. The brochure is at the printers.

Don expressed the committee’s goal for this year is to try to increase parent involvement. There was a lot of discussion on how to accomplish this. There is a committee that is presently working on making changes to the Cary Academy website. Don asked if the family-school partnership committee had any suggestions for the website committee? A number of ideas were discussed to try to get parents excited and interested to look at the website more frequently. Don will get statistics as to how often families are utilizing the website. One problem is to try to separate out the students from the parents. Don thought those statistics could be looked at individually. Dot had an idea if the students come home and say if you read xyz on the website and sign it, then the students could get extra credit or maybe a homework pass or maybe a class party depending on who gets the highest number of parents reading it. This was one way to try to get parents to utilize the intranet and form habits to look on the website as part of their daily or weekly routine. It was also talked about would hard copies be read more than parents looking on the website. Hard copies tend to get thrown in the garbage or lost in a stack of piled papers and forgotten. This committee felt that sending hard copies would not increase parent involvement. (Hard copies are available to anyone who requests them.)

The committee felt strongly that a good way to get parents involved is to educate them from the beginning ie: when they start with the school. (For the most part it would be upon their children entering 6^th grade.) It was suggested that in the first couple weeks of the school year as part of orientation to include a 30-60 minute session where the parents can be sitting in front of a computer screen and be walked thru the intranet. Their school e-mail can also be forwarded to their personal e-mail at this orientation. It was also discussed to look into a "help desk" run by parents on week nights and/or weekends. It would need to be looked at to see if there would be a need for this additional service.

In lieu of "Breakfast with Berger", it was decided to have a "How to get more of CA Website with Berger" some time in the spring. It was thought 18 couples should be the approximate number of each session. This would allow one computer per family. It could start at 7:30 am until 8:30 am. This would accommodate working parents and it would coincide with morning drop off. To start with, 6^th grade parents with no siblings should be invited. Invitations would be sent with telephone calls made if there is no response. The approximate number of families of that group is 60. It was thought to have 3 spring dates. Don was to work on the invitations and other details, ie:staffing the orientation. He would call on other committee members if he needs help.

Bob Roth distributed a summary sheet of comments and corresponding suggestions from the 2000 School Survey regarding communication.  He felt this was a good source of ideas for the committee to consider in striving for their goal of facilitating communication between the school and parents.

The next family-school partnership committee meeting will be, Monday April 2, 2001 at 4:00 p.m.

The meeting was adjourned at approximately 5:15.

Respectfully Submitted,