Handouts distributed by speakers are linked below (click on underlined red titles)
Thursday, November 7 Handouts
Valerie Greenhill Keynote
Workshop with Valerie Greenhill
Workshops
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Portrait of a Graduate: A Vermont Case Study - Join leadership from Windsor Central Supervisory Union to explore how they worked collaboratively with community members to develop a Portrait of a Graduate and Strategic Plan. Through this process they engaged with over 60 stakeholders—community members, parents, educators,and students. Together, they crafted a collective vision and their Portrait. They identified priorities that would help their Portrait come to life and incorporated the goals and strategies in their Strategic Plan. In this session, apply learnings from their journey to your own visioning goals.
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Essential Work of Vermont School Boards I: Vision and Monitoring - Join VSBA staff for an in-depth exploration of school board work, roles and responsibilities. The highly-interactive, problem-solving sessions will challenge you to grapple with real-world school board issues. We’ll investigate best practices through in-depth study of the critical responsibilities of school boards and school board members. These workshops are generally designed for newer school board members, but all are welcome.
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(Re)Considering Vermont’s Equalized Pupil Calculation - During this session, researchers from the University of Vermont will preview findings from their year-long study of the State’s existing approach to incorporating pupil weights in its equalized pupil calculations.
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Proficiency-Based Learning in Vermont: Lessons Learned and Next Steps - Act 77 became law in July 2013, ushering in work in all Vermont schools to move toward proficiency-based learning. Great Schools Partnership, working with the Vermont Agency of Education, ran a series of seminars between December 2014 and June 2015 to help schools as they began the process of developing their own proficiency-based learning system. Since 2015, schools across Vermont have had varying degrees of success with this work leading to a series of lessons learned and suggestions for possible next steps. Great Schools Partnership has continued to work with a number of schools and districts in Vermont through school-based coaching as well as in convening the League of Innovative Schools. In this workshop, a Great Schools Partnership Senior Associate and two Vermont educators will share their lessons learned, followed by a discussion of the next level of proficiency-based learning in Vermont.
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Community Engagement: A Success Story - A district’s Vision of Learning is a set of tools, inclusive of a vision and mission statement, the district’s core beliefs and values, strategic long term objectives and student learning expectations designed to guide the work.
As we know, life is not fixed and neither is education. It is essential for schools to change and adapt to our changing world and the needs of our students. A district’s Vision of Learning must be held by all the stakeholders of its time and each of the components within that vision must align.
Effective education governance requires the board to engage all stakeholders in the creation of a Vision of Learning. Join administrators, teachers, students, community and board members of the Milton Town School District as they share their experience to develop a comprehensive Vision of Learning that honors all voices.
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Essential Work of Vermont School Boards II: Budgeting and Financial Oversight - Join VSBA staff for an in-depth exploration of school board work, roles and responsibilities. The highly-interactive, problem-solving sessions will challenge you to grapple with real-world school board issues. We’ll investigate best practices through in-depth study of the critical responsibilities of school boards and school board members. These workshops are generally designed for newer school board members, but all are welcome.
VSBA Business Meeting
Friday, November 8 Handouts
Student Keynotes
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Being Proactive: Making Student Data Privacy a Priority - In 2018, Vermont began the Vermont Student Privacy Alliance, which is part of a national effort from the Student Data Privacy Consortium. Come learn about this work and how your district can be proactive in protecting student’s personally identifiable information (PII) from being shared, marketed, or otherwise compromised in our increasingly online world. It’s not about creating fear, but about engaging with your vendor partners to collaboratively agree on the collection practices from online apps and tools. We’ll provide a national perspective on the issues, talk about the work here in Vermont, and discuss various ways of building awareness amongst your staff to keep student data safe. Finally, we’ll take a tour of the tools and encourage you to get your district involved.
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Building Our Future: School Facilities Planning - Many grapple with contending with modernizing facilities, declining enrollment and improving educational offerings for equity, opportunity and achievement. Learn about the proactive facilities planning effort, "Building Our Future" undertaken by the Addison Central School District: their rationale, experience, process and lessons learned.
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Did the Graduates Graduate? Lessons and Reflections from a 4-Year Follow Up on Vermont’s High School Class of 2012 - In VSAC’s latest research, we examined the on-time college completion rates of Vermont high school graduates. We will present findings from this research and discuss Vermont’s challenges and opportunities with regards to our future high school graduates’ postsecondary success.