NORTH KINGSTOWN SCHOOL COMMITTEE

Tuesday, September 24, 2002

Elementary School K-5 Organization Advisory Committee

 

Central Administration Building                                                                         100 Fairway Drive, North Kingstown

“Challenging Student Excellence”

 

MINUTES

 

 

The meeting with the two committees began at 7:08 PM and ended at 9:45 PM.

 

Present for the School Committee were Lynne Haft, Carol Hueston, Karin Forbes, Pat Watkins, and Denise Coppa.

 

Dr. Halley was present for Administration.

 

Issues were discussed and questions were answered pertaining to how the K-5 committee is coming along with the task the school committee charged them with.  The group is scheduled to present its findings to the public in October.

The group has been broken down into six separate action groups:

 

  1. Demographic/Town Growth – How much town is growing and where; found that school population growth has remained flat and will probably stay the same over the next few years; majority of growth is in southwest corner of town, while schools are in the northwest corner.
  2. Bus Modeling System – By making use of the district’s VersaTrans software to break the town down into 44 cells, the group feeds information into the program to better utilize the space of each elementary school.
  3. Budget/Finance Group – Must set up system to compare cost of each proposal brought forth by the group as a whole.
  4. Physical Plant – Visited each school and determined that the district has 97 usable classrooms (less art, music, library, and computer rooms) in each school.  Space would be reserved for speech, reading, special needs and other programs.
  5. New School Process – Was concerned with private school enrollment and the impact a new parochial school at St Bernard’s would have on the district.
  6. Socioeconomic Issues – Mainly concerned with educational equity and examining how to implement innovative scholastic programming such as magnet schools.

 

During this meeting the School Committee charged the K-5 committee to come up with two scenarios when they make their final presentation to the School Committee: one with half day kindergarten; and one with full day kindergarten, and the costs associated with both.  Dr. Cirillo agreed to this proposal.

 

The School Committee offered their praise for the obvious hard work and dedication that the K-5 committee members have given to their project.  The School Committee members each commented that they look forward to the final report.

 

                                                                                                               

Respectfully submitted,

 

 

                                                                                                                                                                                               

                                                                                                                                Konnie M. Mazur

                                                                                                                    School Committee Secretary