October 2005 Minutes

Minutes from each meeting will be available on the school web site, submitted by Cynthia Wolfe, Secretary this year.

Finance Report:

The group voted to add $7500 to the $6000 already budgeted for grants for the teachers, since we have a $12500 balance from last year. This will leave $5000 for cushion in our account.

Membership report:

Open house was a success, with almost 200 total now in membership. Since there are probably 3000 parents with children at Capital, we are still missing the great majority of parents and need to increase membership and involvement. There will be a subcommittee to do some brainstorming and come up with suggestions how to increase membership – Cynthia Wolfe, Laurie Schindler, and Peggy Martinez will work on this and send out an email with the date, time and location for a meeting.

Vote on Budget for this school year

Estimated total expenses were $15000 – with an additional $7500 to be added to the Grants, for a budget of $22,500. Estimated income, based on last year’s results, is $15,000, with an additional $12500 left over from last year.

Discussion about CHSPO sponsoring some parent (and student) Ed nights:

Decision was made to sponsor one event this year, with a pizza dinner provided.
Site Council will also have an event. We will coordinate with them through Ed Thorpe.

Committee Reports:

Senior: Already signing up for the Grad night Party. Working on Baccalaureate and Prom. There will be a Senior Picture Ad workshop this week Tues and Weds

Junior: Doing a nonevent fundraiser (asking for straight donations), in February. They are selling tshirts for the classes of 2006-2009. Contact Cathy Jesernig.

Chairs for the Father Daughter Dance is Vicki Schmidt and Sue Schumaker. The dates of the two dances are APRIL 1ST (NOTE this is a change) and 22ND.

Sophomore: Also asking for straight donations

Freshman: A new CHAIR is needed, who can make the CHSPO meeting each month.

Cougar Connection: Those booklets already purchased (but not distributed) will be distributed to the students when Peggy Martinez puts them in the 2nd period teachers’ boxes. There are still many Connection books to be sold. We will bring them to every event at the school and sell them for $20 OR give for free if the parents sign up to be members of CHSPO (which costs $20).

Grocery vouchers:
Anyone who has a Safeway savings card can go on line at www.escrip.com and log in so that a percent of all their purchases automatically goes to CHSPO .

Bookfair Fundraiser: DEC 3RD 9am-11pm at Barnes and Noble A significant amount of the proceeds (from any book bought using the free vouchers) will go to CHSPO.

The vouchers will be handed out to the students and also available at the ASB window and CHS library.

Newsletter: There will be a work party MON Oct 24th 8-11am at school to put this together. Lots of fun!

Grants: There are already 4 requests. Dawn Hooper is the Chair of the committee to decide on the grants by October 31st. Forms were given to teachers for grant requests.

Storage problems: Ed Thorpe will look into storage options.

Communications:

A few teachers do broad-based emails about their classwork. This is much appreciated. There was a discussion concluding that it would be helpful to families if more teachers did broad-based emails with the homework listed and class plans, so that parents could have some idea of what is going on in their student’s classes and lives. They could be encouraged.

Terri Poff explained that if a parent is not getting a response back from a teacher then an administrator should be told, to help with the communications problem.

Communications with the Main and Activities Offices are much improved this year with the more centralized system.

Concerns:

Ms. Poff gave the good news that since the winter finals were scheduled the same week as the WASLS, the teachers had decided to move the Finals up one week earlier, to March 8-10th, so that the students would not be doubly stressed.

IB Gen Tech can satisfy both the IB requirements as well as Occupational requirement, so there will probably be a 0 hour (7am) IB Gen Tech class offered next year instead of the IB Psych class.

There are about 20 students who will need a math class developed for them for Senior year, since they will take Calculus as Juniors. One option is to offer an AP Statistics course which is a college course but does not have to be taught in sequence with other math classes, so it could be taken by students of various grades.

Site Council is discussing the IB versus AP classes again. PARENTAL INPUT is needed – concerned parents are urged to please write their opinions and give them to Terri Poff soon.