Chelsea Public School
Board Beliefs
2008-2009 (and beyond)

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Culture

We believe that the culture of our school is built upon respect and cooperation: respect for each other, our school, our facilities and our community; cooperation amongst students, teachers, administration, staff and community members. We believe that by living and celebrating this culture we will be more successful in attracting and retaining students, teachers, administrators, staff and volunteers.

We believe that we need to promote the benefits of being a small school – that we can know our students' needs more easily and therefore support them more easily. We take seriously the responsibility to follow through and ensure that the benefits we promote are real.

Curriculum

We believe that an integrated K-12 curriculum, aligned with the VT Framework is crucial to ensuring that our students have learned the skills they need to succeed in the world beyond our school. We believe the administration and faculty need to continue the work on designing and documenting an integrated K-12 curriculum.

We believe that on-going assessment of our curriculum – how well it is being implemented, how successful it is in educating our students and what changes need to be made – is critical to ensure our curriculum remains vital and relevant. As part of the work on assessment design, we believe the administration and faculty should create a process for formally evaluating students at the end of the school year to ensure that information relevant to the students' teacher(s) in the coming year is documented and readily accessible, rather than passed on informally or by word of mouth.

Resource Sharing

We believe that in this time of declining enrollment and rising costs, our school district must look at every opportunity for sharing resources with neighboring schools and districts, including the work already done at the Supervisory Union level on shared bids for fuel, paper, etc, working with South Royalton High School to evaluate opportunities to share courses and/or teachers, investigating partnerships with the community for mentoring and/or teaching at the school, as well as investigating potential partnerships with other schools (Tunbridge, Washington, Wellspring, etc.).

Recruitment

For a variety of reasons, our school is now clearly playing in a competitive environment at all levels (elementary to high school). It is essential that we take advantage of every opportunity to promote positively our school to students and parents. This could happen at sporting events, community events, other school visits, etc.

Additionally, the administration and faculty must put together a dedicated team responsible for on-going recruitment research and strategy. The strategy should consider who we are trying to reach (students and parents, from what towns and schools?), various ways to reach them (school visits, brochures, course of study package, website, events, etc.), the best time to reach them (at what age and at what time of the year), and what resources (human and financial) are needed to achieve the strategy.

Facilities

We believe a well maintained, inspiring facility is an important factor in the success of our students and employees. Our facilities are aging and require regular and long-term maintenance. In addition, we have some larger issues that will require our attention, such as the heating plan. We believe we need a detailed long term facilities plan that looks at all on-going and long term needs in terms of a time-line and costs. Consideration should be given to whether or not we could get any grants (historic preservation) for work on the older part of the school.

Other thoughts / ideas

In addition to other reasons, we have heard that some kids choose other schools because they don't want to do a senior project. How do we turn our senior projects into an asset rather than a liability? This is a great opportunity for kids that we need to promote more positively.

Enrichment – in addition to our core curriculum, we believe we should investigate ways to broaden education for all students, as well as, perhaps, looking at targeted program for high achievers.

These last two items should probably be linked to the curriculum work noted earlier in the document.