Progress Report on the Craftsbury Community School Collaboration
February 9, 2010
The Steering Committee, a sub-committee of the School Board, has assembled a group of Craftsbury residents, referred to as Stakeholders, to participate in a collaborative process, with the intention of ensuring that all demographics and viewpoints about Craftsbury Schools are represented. The group remains open for anyone to join, but usually between 25 and 45 people attend the Thursday evening meetings. The emphasis is on bringing diverse people with many different points of view into the same room to create a proposal for the School Board to consider regarding the future path of Craftsbury Schools.
Up to this point the School Board has drafted proposals for the Town to review and vote on. The collaborative process will recommend a proposal for the School Board to consider. The facilitator, Heidi Krantz, is a volunteer who has a wealth of experience facilitating collaborative processes.
The job of the Stakeholders is not to promote pet projects or lobby for personal agendas, but to listen carefully, share ideas, consider new information, ask questions, and ultimately co-create a path forward. Heidi has been doing a wonderful job keeping the meetings up beat and on task.
Stakeholders have spent several meetings identifying what questions we have about the schools. We will use those questions to generate information so that we can prioritize and consolidate the topics and develop our proposals. We spent one session touring the entire school physical plant with Chris Young, the Principal and Harry Miller, a School Board Member who has extensive knowledge about building codes and previous renovations done at the school. We received a site assessment and a packet of other information, including the plans for future renovations and the current demographics and course offerings at Craftsbury Schools. Now we are working on further prioritizing and condensing our questions to boil them down into core ideas that will guide us in seeking information. From here we will develop proposals for further research, and when we have additional information we will get into the nitty gritty of discussing and deciding upon specific proposals to bring to the School Board and the Town.
We meet the first and third Thursday of every month. You are welcome to join us!
