Board Meets Tonight

There will be multiple school board committee meetings tonight at the Spellman Education Building, 782 Springdale Drive, Exton PA.

• The Education Committee will meet at 6:30pm.

• Pupil Services will meet at 7pm.

• Agendas for both meetings can be found here.

• The meeting will be live streamed here.

• If you’d like to make a comment at the meeting, you’ll need to attend in person. See this page for information on making public comments.

Topics of interest that will be covered in tonight’s meetings are:

• Reports on mental health services, the benefits of SEL*, and a look at the PR/communication of the WCASD.

• An overview of Collegium Charter School. This is timely after our series last week that looks at charter school funding.

• WCASD reveals their "EQUITY ACTION PLAN".

• The Health & Safety Plan is back on the table.

Some questions/concerns we have after viewing the agendas:

1. How much of the agenda is devoted to academics?

2. Why is the district planning to spend $500,000 for SEL (Thom Sketcher Associates) but won't share that content with parents? Shouldn't parents have a Right to Know what their children are learning? (A RTK was submitted to the district to view this information but the district denied the RTK, stating that the documents are copyrighted and thus cannot be reviewed by the public.)

3. There are 2 sides to every story yet the district only presents their side at meetings and allows opposing viewpoints to speak for only 3 minutes.

*Benefits of SEL. We will dig into this topic in a future post, but for now, consider:

• Some SEL programs track students digitally, and this raises important questions about who owns this data, where the data is stored, who has access to the data, how the data is used, and whether or not our children's data being bought and/or sold.

• SEL is about changing the focus of education from test scores to character (see image below from WCASD flyer) and we believe that our district's focus should be on academics before character.

If you’d like our content delivered directly to your inbox, click here and scroll to the bottom of the page to sign-up.