Posted: Wednesday, August 18, 2010 10:26 pm

Updated 9 a.m. Thursday
WCS 'Input Session' at BHS draws countywide crowd
By JILL BURGIN
For Brentwood Home Page
Nearly 100 parents from all parts of the county attended a Williamson County Schools community meeting last night at Brentwood High School.

They weren’t there to listen to a speaker but to generate ideas about what they will want their children to have learned by the year 2017.

One of five meetings held throughout the district this week, the session at BHS followed the same format as the others to explore parent and community thoughts on five topics: finance; student programs to include academics, arts and athletics; growth/planning/zoning; technology; and teacher quality.

After a brief welcome and overview with local consultant Gary Minor, the attendees met in small groups to brainstorm for two hours about their most important goals for their children in the next seven years. The groups then prioritized their ideas with colored stickers.

Minor told the group he would collect and analyze the ideas from all the sessions and present the information to the school board, though he did not say when the board would receive the info.

During last night’s session at BHS, one small group led by Ravenwood administrators Dr. Pam Vaden, Rob Dickerson and Reggie Mason wasted no time in stating their wish lists for student programming, including securing funding for math specialists, beefing up high-school instruction in economics and statistics, early-elementary foreign language instruction and math tracking in elementary school.

The group stressed equity and consistency in instruction across the county, including offering the same number of AP classes at all county high schools, for example.

Teacher quality brought out more fervent discussions, as many in the group facilitated by Vaden wanted formal parental and peer reviews for teachers and to make tenure more difficult to achieve.

Technology should no longer be an ancillary course, agreed the group, but embedded in instruction the way it is in the workplace and used in problem solving as well.

The tone became more contentious when the discussion turned to PTO purchases of technology such as SMART boards. One mother who did not want to be identified said that if technology is a priority when new schools are built, the same technology should be retrofitted into older schools.

When the discussion moved on to growth, planning and zoning, the group both laughed and groaned at the hot-button issue. Many in the group in Vaden’s room had been rezoned multiple times and were wary of that happening again.

Ideas included grandfathering current freshmen when rezoning, charging developers of new subdivisions with significant impact fees, moving a larger percentage of students when rezoning high schools, and improving communication between the county, city and school officials when planning for schools.

The more vocal parents in the room said they would rather have portable classrooms than be rezoned, while one pointed out that common areas like gyms and libraries would still be crowded and some students would have to eat lunch at 10 a.m. if that were the case.

When the time came to discuss finances, one dad joked, “Get more money.” Though the county system has had to make significant cuts for this school year, the finance category generated the least discussion.

Most in the small group favored accountability for spending, an analysis of the current central office staff overhead and identifying all sources of the county’s income.

Williamson County School Board Chair Pat Anderson, who rotated through all the small groups at the BHS session and others on the previous night, said she noticed that people who attended the meetings seemed to want the same things overall at each school.

 “I have noticed similar comments at the meetings I’ve been to,” Anderson said. “I’ve also heard people wanting things that we already do. I think it’s a good point to begin to communicate better with parents.”

As an example, Anderson mentioned a rigorous six-month technology study the district recently completed to analyze the system’s future needs.  “These meetings are so helpful for us because sometimes we don’t know what parents don’t know,” Anderson said.

The last community meetings will take place tonight at Spring Station Middle School and Page High School from 6-8 p.m.