Mehlville School Board to Focus on Community, Meeting Efficiency at Retreat

The Mehlville school board will focus on its efficiency and community engagement at their annual retreat next Saturday.

For the first time, the retreat will have a tentative schedule, allowing members of the community to come when a specific topic interests them. The retreat is scheduled for 8:30 a.m. Sept. 8 at .

At Thursday’s board meeting, secretary Larry Felton outlined 10 topics for the agenda. The board deleted, narrowed and combined those topics to four work sessions ranging from 30 to 90 minutes.

Though the board originally wanted to discuss assessments for student achievement, Superintendent Eric Knost suggested that topic be left in his hands and saved for a workshop later in the year.

“I’d like to take the board a little bit intentionally into the minutia so you can understand there are significant metrics that mean a lot to us in the individual efforts of student achievement,” he said.

Mark Stoner said the board would be discussing student achievement as part of every topic. The retreat should also focus on getting feedback from the community, staff and students during its evaluation process, he said.

The agenda topics and tentative schedule are as follows:

Subjects for board meetings (8:30 a.m. – 10 a.m.)

• Points of emphasis for the school year and a calendar for those points
• Program evaluations and areas where more information is needed
• Agenda format and meeting efficiency

-15 min break

Board development and self-evaluation (10:15 a.m. – 11:15 a.m.)

            Reviewing 2011-2012 board goals

-15 min break

Community engagement (11:30 a.m. until 12:30 p.m.)

• Board communication internally, with the community and with the superintendent
• A 30-minute conversation with new communications director John Wolff about board interaction with the media

-15 min break

Board representation on committees (12:45 p.m. – 1:15 p.m.)

The board and Mehlville National Education Association . The board is scheduled to select members for several committees including:

• Committee for reviewing district leave policy
• Committee to attract new teachers to the district
• Study committee for merit-based pay