 Welcome to this webinar entitled Alberta School Council's Association. This is the School Council Leaders' Webinar with Lisa Dickner. This webinar is brought to you as a collaborative project by Alberta School Council Association and ARPDC as a result of a grant from Alberta Education to support implementation. In a minute, you'll be seeing our presenters' slides and hearing her audio. So we encourage you to participate as much as you can. And if you enjoy this type of learning opportunity, please visit Edmonton Regional Learning Consortia's website for further learning opportunities. Also, if you'd like to get the handouts and other resources to accompany this, such as a presenter's PowerPoint, you can visit this Wiki link, which I'll put into the chat window right now. Okay, so now it's great pleasure that I'm going to pass you over to Lisa Dickner from Alberta School Council's Association. Thanks very much, Carla. I'm excited to be here. This is my first webinar to lead, and so I'm looking forward to all your assistance as we go along. And thanks, Carla, for preparing everybody so well. And also just a real shout-out to all the other moderators who are giving us a hand in getting everybody prepared. That's been a great help. So just a quickie about me. My background is I've done four years with the ASCA as a facilitator, but mostly I'm in the field, so I get to see everybody face-to-face. So this is a really different environment for me, but one that I know will be very powerful. I'm glad that you can come from your own homes and visit us and go through these slides together. So as we mentioned earlier, please connect with us by either giving us a smiley face or a little frowny face if you have some questions or type in a note. That'll help us know if we're on track. All right, so let's stroll on and get to know a little bit about who's bringing you this webinar. So the Alberta School Council's Association does a whole bunch of things, and one of the things we're really into is skill-building. And we do a lot of onsite service and support through workshops, and we also do phone consultations. And in addition to that, we've got some great resources. Now, I believe that you were sent an email link, and there's also a hyperlink on your screen now, to our Alberta School Council Association resource manual. And a lot of the content I'm going to talk about today is also there. So if you want to go back and review anything or you want to share anything, this is a great place to go. And if you ever lose that link, it's always on the front page of our website. At the end of our session today, I'm going to ask Wendy Kever from our office to say a few words and give you a little website tour, because we've launched a brand new website this fall, and it's excellent. And it's for everybody to get interactive. All right, I see some scribbles on my screen. No, now I don't. All right, so I'm just going to move us towards the focus of our session today. So how long do you have to be on School Council before you find out what's really going on? And I want to ensure you that what we're going to do today is going to take you right there really quickly. So our objective is to understand the roles of School Council members so that we can focus on supporting, enhancing student learning and performance. And we've got some really neat tips and tricks that will help you along your way and also get you really involved or to get others involved. Because I think it's important that we get everybody or as many people as we can involved in our school program. Now, there's a couple housekeeping items. The seminar is scheduled for about 90 minutes. And can you give me a smiley face if you've got your handouts in advance? Excellent. Okay, so it's showing that lots of people have them handy. Now, they're for reference for today, and I just want you to be able to read them as you need to. We're going to focus on the slides on the screen, though. But if you miss them, you can get them from the Wiki and in the chat window there was a link in order to get them. And if you have any difficulty getting them, then just let us know and we can give you a hand. Now, it's pretty informal in the way that you can raise your hand. You can show me your emotions. And we also are going to have places where you can participate and get involved in a different way. So we hope that you enjoy the experience and that you have a lot of fun doing this. We have a couple of ground rules. And the first one is just to learn confidentiality that we want to talk about the content, but we want to keep confidential the names and the opinions of the folks who want to share in the room. But please share the content with anybody that will listen. We want you to listen actively. And you know what's kind of funny? Right now you're going to listen a lot to me, but we want you to be able to watch the chat window for questions and things that folks want to say or information they want to share. So please feel free to type in any little notes. We can watch it as it scrolls by and also respond to it. And that way you can hear what others are thinking and saying in a session. Now, we want you to share where you feel comfortable. So you may not want to answer all the questions, but please, when you'd like to, speak up and we can hear your voice or we can see your typing. And then we can respond to those comments and we can get to know what you'd like to know more about. In this session with 80 participants, we're going to have a sense that everybody's going to have some different views and opinions and we just want to be very respectful and hear everybody out and find out where we can be of assistance. And because this is a different way to learn for most of us, we want to just take responsibility for your own learning, ask questions where you need to and just give us a hand when if you want to put your hand up, you can clarify anything, but just whatever you need to do to make this a really great learning experience. And the last and sometimes the most important one is let's enjoy ourselves here and have a good time. So if everybody wants to enjoy themselves in the session, maybe give me a clap. Yeah, I'm getting some claps. Oh, and I got a couple of hands raised. Just let us know if you do have any questions. It's easy to click the wrong button, too. All right. Thanks, Linda. Excellent. Okay. So we're going to get some information from you. Let's see where everybody's from. I'm going to let Carla manage this part for us to do a poll. Thanks, Lisa. So it's the same way we did the one in the practice round. You guys are faster than I need to be. So just let us know where you're at. So by clicking on those ABC or D icons, and I'm sorry, it was very generic about where we are. I only could have five choices. So you've got A, Northern Alberta, B, Greater Edmonton Area, C, Central Alberta. And that's, I guess, when I'm referring to Central, it's kind of all around. And then Calgary and Southern Alberta or other. Okay. So I think what we'll do now is we will publish our results and we can see exactly where everybody is. So I'll pass it over to Lisa now. So Lisa, if you want to just stick your mic back on and you can tell us where you found everyone. Okay. The funny thing is I thought I was, but I'm all in now. Okay. So it looks like we've got a pretty big chunk from the Greater Edmonton Area and another big chunk from the Calgary and Southern Alberta. But nice to see that we've got some folks from Northern Alberta and we have some people from quite a distance. I understand there's somebody here from Montreal as well. So welcome to you all. Glad that you could all participate. And let's roll on to getting into some of the content. Oh, sorry. No, we're going to do one more poll. My apologies. Let's get a look at who's here today, whether you're parents, a student, a teacher. So very similar to last time with the poll. Okay. And I will publish those results in three, in two. So vote now and here we go. Okay. So we have a majority of parents present. So we actually have our own school council meeting going on. But we've got some other folks in the room as well. Looks like we've got somebody from admin or some principals and we've got some community members. Excellent. And I think we have some other folks in the room as well, just giving us a hand. Okay. Excellent. Well, let's talk about the foundations around school councils. And what I want to do is I want to give you a bit of a picture of some of the basic terminology that we're going to use throughout the session and we're going to apply it as we get to the end. So the first thing is, and this comes right out of the school act. So it's a group of people who work together to advise the principal and the board. So that's really important. This is what brings us together. This gives us our purpose. And we want to focus on matters relating to the school. And, you know, when we get together, there's lots of things we can talk about. But when we get to the school council job, we just want to focus on the school. Now, in addition to that, that's our means to work together. And we go back to supporting and enhancing student learning. And that comes right out of our resource manual, that we want this to be the focus and the premise for why we're doing this. All right. So the next slide, this role of school councils, is a really key one. So now that we know why we're together, let's look at some of the key things that we need to do to keep ourselves in line with other school councils around the province. We want to focus on the uniqueness of our school. So that means looking at the culture. How do we foster, develop, maintain it? How do we reflect it in the work that we do? What makes us unique? The second thing that we do is we provide an opportunity to participate in the advisory role. So if our job is to advise the principal on the board, then we need to figure out a way to meet and get together and for everybody to have their voices heard. And so that kind of links to the next one about creating a forum for discussion. And we typically think about discussion as being face-to-face, but it doesn't have to be that way. Every school council should consider different ways that they can discuss issues that are meaningful to the school. And so if meetings don't draw as many people out as you want, then think about other ways to do that. And lastly, we want to seek and represent school community views. If we're finding our meetings getting smaller and smaller, we're not necessarily hearing from as many people as we want. So if we've created some forums and they're not the right ones, then let's find other ways to seek and represent school community views. Now, I'm just curious. Is this what your school council is doing right now? Is this the role that you're fulfilling? So give me either a smiley face or a confused face. All right, so we have a bit of a mix here. So I want you to keep that in mind. And as you go back to your school council, bring this page back and say, you know, are we doing this or how are we doing this? And if we're not, then let's have a talk about that. All right, school council membership. It's one of those pieces in the school act that's prescribed. It's not similar to a society where you pick what kind of members you're going to have. We always have a principal or administration, a teacher. If it's senior high, then it's a student who will join you. But the big piece is parents of children enrolled in the school must be the majority. And if you want others, if you want any community members, then you absolutely can include those in your team. But this is what makes up school council membership. All right. Okay. Oh, I've got a question from Maureen. Can I elaborate on different examples on how to solicit further discussion? Okay, so one of the things you can do is, depending on technology in your area, you may try to have some kind of an e-mail forum where you send questions out by e-mail to provoke discussion and to get parents engaged. You may want to do a questionnaire that's sent out through the school where parents can talk about things that they want to either do or places they want to be involved. Susan has suggested SurveyMonkey. Questionnaires, all of those things can get parents talking. The other thing you can do is find out, you know, if meetings aren't the thing, is it the day or the time or is it the content you've been talking about? Because some of those things can really affect whether folks want to come out or not. Is that helpful? All right. Great. Thanks, Maureen. Oh, and language barriers too. You know what, Barbara? You are so right. We're seeing a lot of diversity in our schools. And I think we need to figure out what's a way to communicate. And one of the pieces that I've been involved in in another part of my career is around plain language. I do find that sometimes we will use language that's common to a group of us but not necessarily common to other people. And if you think about those pieces, what kind of message do we send out? Can we make it simpler and clearer and more to the point? I think that would be really helpful. And I see in the chat there's a couple of more comments coming in, which are great. So keep an eye on that as you hear me talk and you're watching the screen. There's lots of neat things coming on. All right. So let's have a quick talk about functions. So I talked earlier about the role of a council. Well, our job is to advise the principal and the board on any matter relating to the school. And that's pretty broad. But if it relates to the school, then we should have an opportunity to advise about that. We can also talk about our own operating procedures, how we want to manage our meetings and how we want to organize ourselves. It's really up to us. There's nothing saying how to do that specifically. But we should have something that everybody knows what we're doing. So we should share that message with all of our school councils. We need to carry out activities related to our advisory role. All of the discussion that we just had is really, really important for saying, okay, how are we going to advise? What will that look like? And so if it means that we do some survey monkey activity by getting people's opinions or we set up meetings at different times or we have more formal events where we call the school community together, we make those choices totally up to us. Oh, and someone I see has mentioned a newsletter. And I think that also helps. Now, the second last bullet is about submitting an annual report of activities and financial statements to the school board. It's important that we keep a record of the activities that we are doing to share where our school council is having some success and maybe even where we are challenged. What are the issues that we're working on? And it's important to know province-wide that folks are active. And if they're not, let's get them active. Now, lastly, we also can handle money. And that's regardless of whether we have a parent fundraising society or not. Oh, I've got one hand. Wendy, would you like to grab the mic? Oh, no, I have to. So Wendy, if you did want to... Oh, okay. There she goes. She's just going to type us in for us. We've had lots of good chat going on here too. Lisa, just to keep in mind, lots of people talking about how we can set up their group pages on the ASCA website. Some schools are talking about how they're using Facebook as well to send messages and to gather their community. And yes, anyone can join the ASCA community and we're going to have a representative step you through that later on. Okay, so once Wendy, she's just looking into writing her question. We can certainly try to address that. And if not, if Lisa continues on, then we can come back to your question as well once we've received it, that would be great. Okay. Thanks, Carla. If I don't see it right away, can you just like me? Oh, there we go. In regards to the annual report, is it something that every school council should be doing? And then about the financials. So every school council should be providing an annual report by September 30th. And you can speak to your administrator or principal about that. And as far as financials, if you do financials with the school council, then you should give a report of that, a financial statement. But if it's with the Fundraising Society, no, that financial report goes to, through the Society's branch of Alberta. If that makes sense. Let's just clarify with Wendy. Is that the question you were asking? Is this new? No, the report isn't new. The report itself has been around for quite a long time. Maybe I could have Wendy weigh in on that. All right. We were referring to the regulation to submit annual reports to the school board. That's not new. That's actually been in the legislation since at least 1995 from what I'm aware of. As far as submitting the financials, again, if the school council itself is raising monies, that does have to be included in the annual report to the board. If it's only the society that is raising money, that goes to corporate registries. All right. And Lorna, your question about what the government was moving away from school councils handling money. I think the idea is that if school councils need to raise money or want to raise money, they can. If they're going to raise it in larger amounts, then they might want to do it through a society so that it could be set aside from the business of school council because we don't want that to interfere with the work that school council needs to do around advising. All right. So I see we're starting to slide into another conversation around money and around societies. What I'm going to do for now is set that aside and maybe we can go back there in the end and address those. Or we can have you call into our office and we can have a one-on-one conversation if that sounds OK. All right. OK. So I'd like to do a quick poll around what best describes your length of involvement in school council. So we've got A, B, C, and D. So there we go, Lisa. So I know we didn't quite get everybody, but I thought we would just speed it up a little bit faster. Sure. That sounds good. OK. So we've got a real mix of involvement that we've got about 70% have been kind of between the one and five years. And we have some folks on either end participating that this is really new to you or whether you've had lots of experience, maybe had lots of kids go through the school system. So you're going to find that some of this information might feel new, even though you've been around for a long time. It may not have come across your school council table. And for others of you, this might be reinforcing information that you've heard before. So I will come back to some of the other comments at the end if we want to wrap some of those pieces up. And right now, we're going to move into the piece around what we are and what we are not. All right. So there are some things that we don't do. Oh, whoops. Carla, do I have to pull this? Yes, that's it. There we go. All right. So some of the things that we don't do is we're not school governance bodies or employers. That's where the school board has to do their job. We don't have to be managers, although there's a couple of managers with us today. That's the principal's job. And here's where we're approaching with caution. Now, this is linked to some of the conversation that we started to get into. Our focus is not to be primarily fundraisers and we're not primarily lobbyists, although we do want to advocate for our schools. And the last one is that we are not about a complaint session. And we want to be very positive about the work that we do together and look for ways to move ahead and move our school ahead and what are things that we can do as a group. Now, I'm just going to touch back on the primarily fundraisers. Right now, what we're trying to focus on is making sure that all school councils are having an active voice advising. And if they're caught up in fundraising activities to the extent that they don't have any energy or time left, then they're probably not advising. They're probably doing more of the busy work that happens with fundraising. And so that's one of the things that we want to try and separate is between the folks that can spend some time fundraising and when we want to get at the table at the school council level, we want to talk about advising. Oh, and just a quick question from Robert about what's the difference between advising and governance. Okay, so advising is around giving opinions and using your resources and your knowledge. Governance is about how we do our business and that's the choice about how we offer up control around the school council and organization. And it can be an important distinction because we all have governance at the school council level, how we want to organize ourselves. Now, and the question is whether we choose after we set up our governance to advise or not. I'm hoping that's helpful. And from a cool Brockson park, yes, there isn't often a fine line between complaining and genuine concerns. And we have to work together to discuss, you know, what's appropriate and that means having a conversation. All right, so now let's talk here about what we all need to do when we participate. So everyone is responsible for effective meetings and we need to understand our roles to allow people to participate and that means we need to figure out how we're organized. If we're the first person in a room and we say I don't really understand how I can put up my hand and how I can participate, we need to talk about how we share information. We want everybody to feel that they can contribute to the meetings, that they're respectful, that they're productive, and that we have an opportunity to say something that is meaningful to us. The last piece is around that we ask a chair to be tasked with the logistics so that everybody can understand their roles, they can be responsible, and that we can be productive. So how many have already been in the chair person's role? So can I get a yes or no? Okay, and we'll publish these results right away. Also two, three, two, one. There we go. And I can move that down for you, Lisa. Great. You bet. Thanks. Okay, so there's a large majority that have had this experience and so I'll be curious to hear as we go along the term, the pieces that we're going to talk about that we think are really important, but you might also want to type in what you also thought was important as we walk through this piece. All right, and for those who haven't had the experience, you might want to in the future, but also we hope this might prepare you if you want to take a step in that direction. Okay, so take a look at the five bullets on the screen. First piece around being the chair person is you're a link to the principal. And there might be many of you that are a link, but we want the principal to have at least a point person to go to to talk about issues and to share discussion around building the agenda. The second one is about coordinating meetings. We want to make sure that meetings are accessible to everybody, that they're at a day in time that can maximize participation, and sometimes it takes a while to get that going. We want to make sure that the chair person is leading the charge around communication. Now, we might delegate that to a person on our council and say, can you help me with being a communicator? But the chair person checks in to say, have we posted this information? Is the agenda available on our website or wherever you'd like to post it? And they usually lead the discussion around the year-end report and bringing together all the great accomplishments of a school council. The next one is around mentorship. Now, for school council volunteers, we want to mentor a volunteer to volunteer whenever we can, and we want to make sure that all our volunteers know that they have somebody to go to. And I often try to build a big mentorship team so that it's not always just one person, but as a chair, we want to make sure that you're encouraging mentorship and supporting it. And the last is around being a spokesperson. And not everybody's really comfortable with this role, and so sometimes you might want to have somebody else work with you if you have a visible spokesperson, or you may do that role yourself, totally up to you. And you'll notice where Carla's pointing at the bottom of the screen, we've got a number of handouts associated with these topics, handouts two, three, and four, and that's just for future reading. So does that resonate with you in terms of what the role of a chair person is? Can I see any claps or hands down or smiley faces? Excellent. Okay, all right, so we're on the right track. Okay, so let's talk about what we all should be doing. We should all be consulting with each other around issues for the school council, and then typically the chairperson consults with the principal and shows a leadership role for the larger group. We all need to communicate with our school community. And I'll give you an example. I meet a lady at the bus who can never get to school council meetings, and I often share with her what's going on, and now she's trying to make her way to these council meetings, and it was really helpful. It was some very soft chat. It wasn't pushing anybody, but I tried to encourage her why she'd want to get involved. Creating the agenda is a place where it's not just the chair's job. Anybody can get something replaced on the agenda, and we just ask the chairperson to pull it together. And the last one is being familiar with procedures. If you like to get your agendas out a week in advance, you want them posted, emailed, et cetera, then try to share with everybody. Let's make sure that we get things in early, and part of this, it becomes an advertising tool. That helps everybody to know what's coming up and say, okay, I want to take time to be at this meeting. It's really important. So everybody can have a role in this. Okay. All right, so here's our Viking Warrior. You've got a lot of leadership qualities. We all have some roles to play, and I mean, if we allowed this guy to go over the edge, we're all playing into this. We all want to share and work with our chair and the leadership around school council and say, okay, we all have a vision. Let's work this together. So how are we going to do that? Well, first thing is, we're going to make sure that everybody knows each other. And I know it might sound silly, but it's one of those things that if you go around the table and you make sure that everybody remembers names and maybe what classes they're in or which teachers they're associated with, people start to gain a comfort. When I come to meetings once a month, I remember faces. I seldom remember names. And so this is a really great opportunity to say, just one more thing, let's make sure that everybody knows each other. Everybody sets the tone, and that can be really a welcoming tone. Susan suggested name tags. I love it. I think it's great. And you know what? It's surprising how many people really appreciate it. They may not want to say it, but they do appreciate it. And Jeff, in answer to my experience of being the chair a couple of years ago, I did introductions at every meeting, and it really helped. And sometimes I'd ask them to even share, you know, what would they like to get out of the meeting? And that sometimes can keep us focused on the priorities and the agenda. We should encourage participation from everyone. And it doesn't have to be every meeting, but it really helps to have an opportunity for people to have some space to participate. And I know it's balanced with starting and finishing on time. It's always a hard one, but you know, we need to respect people's time the best we can. We're often in busy, busy times and not always a lot of opportunities. So we want to make sure that we get all the business done in the time we have. Any questions directed at the presentation so far? I just wanted to say, Lisa, there's some great ideas coming in about how people, you know, connect with their school council, how their introductions make it feel more like a community. So if you want to just allow people just a second or two to read the chat window. I like to have the meeting buddy. That's a really good one. I think Trina put that in. Terry, you've got a question. If you want to go ahead with that. Yeah, I like the ideas about for new parents, the orientation. It's a great thing. I know last year when my son started kindergarten, it was really nice to be able to sort of feel welcome like they actually wanted new people to come and take part. Absolutely. I have often encouraged meetings where we invite kindergarten and grade one parents to a special meeting and just talk about those introductory issues that might help them see why they have a place at the table. I've got a couple more coming in. Terry, did we get a message from you? Yeah, Terry's questions just up here. Just a little bit of clarification on what the school council means. She said that school council met all the parents of the school and the school council executive means only those elected. So if you can address that please. Absolutely. So Terry, yes, school council generically means everybody in the school. When the school council comes together, you might only get a selection of parents. And of those people, then the executive might consist of two, three, four or five people who are either elected or appointed for a specific task. Is that helpful, Terry? All right, good stuff. Okay. So we want to focus on business and processes in the next part here. And we're going to get you to do some activity. And we want to stay away from the personalities that might be associated with some of the questions that we have. So we know that every school council member brings experience and wisdom and sometimes they bring some emotion. But and their beliefs and their own personality and these perspectives, the personalities, they're really valuable. If we had a room full of folks that were all the same, I'm not necessarily sure that would be helpful for the growth of our school. But it does mean that we have to listen carefully to what's going on. So what we're going to do is we're going to do a case study in a couple of minutes to focus on what the business is and the processes and this will all become a little bit clearer. All right, so this is a bit of a quiz. So what's the real focus of school council? Let's see if we can get a few people type in. What's the focus of school council? All right, I've got kids welfare. Oh, I've got fundraising with a sad face. A link between parents and the school, student success and school improvement. So we're getting lots of things typed in and they're all linked to what our real focus is and we have to keep that in mind when we sit at the table together what we need to accomplish because oftentimes we don't have a lot of time together to sit down and so when we get together, we want to make it as productive as possible. All right, thanks everyone for typing in. That was really helpful. All right, so is everybody ready to do some work? Can I have a clap for if you're ready to work? Excellent. Okay, so we have a case study and depending how fast it goes, we could do a second case study and we want to first read the case study that I show on the screen and we want to identify what's the business of school council, the real issue, and then we're going to talk about what should we do about it or the process and not focus on the personality. All right, so take a couple of minutes to read through this and think about what's the business in this school council? What's the real issue? All right, I'm going to get Carla to give me a hand and we're going to transfer some of these points onto the next slide. Sounds good, Lisa. No problem. We'll just go forward. So they're coming in quick and fast. So we'll certainly do our best but we'll pick up one of the key ones that I'm noticing and I'm sure that this is something that everybody here, you know, it's the primary concern is the student safety. So I'm just going to have a look. Absolutely. All right, we've got quite a few coming in and so folks, I haven't been talking for the last minute or so, so I'm hoping that you have not lost audio control. So just take a read through. We've got road safety, parking, student safety. Can I have a frowny face for anybody who's had to deal with this issue at your school? All right, there's a lot of people who have had this experience already which makes it very interesting. So our next question is, so we've identified the bigger issue around this is about student safety and the fact that there are parents that aren't obeying basic traffic safety laws near our school. So my question is, what do we do now? So Carl, I'll have you move to the next slide. No problem, Lisa. And I just wanted to put in the last thing that I like this comment, issue of student safety, but we also do need to just have the viewpoints need to be heard and recognized. And like a lot of people were saying, well, yeah, we certainly don't want to alienate the community. So again, we're just going to ask you to chat in, to use the type, the text chat. How would you deal with the issue and not the personality here? Because I know a lot of people were saying there was a little hint about the control of that case study. So what would be some ideal processes that we could deal with the real issues? So if you could keep your text coming and we'll again, we'll coordinate them on there. We might shut our mics off again just for a minute, so it might seem silent, but I don't think you will have lost audio control or anything like that. It's just that we're typing. So go ahead and see if you can think of some processes of how we could deal with the issue. And I know a few people already did come up with a couple of things that I'll put on there. Excellent. All right. Someone had brought up whether this was one person's issue or many people's issue. That's important to acknowledge whether this is something that is affecting the larger school community or if it is, in fact, one person's conversation. And since so many people had already explored this issue before, what were some of the things you found successful in terms of dealing with these issues? So we have some invite the local authorities to observe the problem or contacting local police or our CMP. All right. There's a lot of suggestions coming in. If we go back to the reason why we sit on school council, it's to advise on any matter relating to our school. And if this would affect our children in a positive or negative way on how they're able to do their work at school, and I would think that school safety close to the property would do that, then that's where parents weigh in. And they want to be a part of a solution to help their school community. So I know we're just trying to move a few of these around so that we can read them all too. Some great ideas. And I'm sorry we can't put every single one of them up there, but we're just highlighting some of the general themes that are coming out. Okay. Excellent. Thanks, Carla. I like the way a lot of people are talking from experience where they have done this in the past. Absolutely. And it really is. We've got Tana's Web said research issues and advise administration. Absolutely. Sometimes that's where the parent's voice can really come in and be very powerful. At our school, they've gone to traffic vests and trying to just raise awareness. One thing that I've noticed in this very short exercise is how quickly you've been able to get to the issues and then have some really productive suggestions around what can we do now? How can we take this and make it a productive conversation? And also, what are some of the things that might help us? Now, Phil has made a comment about, is there already a bylaw or policy about school parking? That would have to be one of the conversations you'd have at the table. Sometimes I'm finding that folks may not necessarily know if there is a policy, a school policy. So that might be the first thing you do is acknowledge the fact that there might be an issue and also whether there's something already written that we should know before we move ahead with making any recommendations. All right, so that was one small glimpse into sharing one of the issues. Is there anybody interested in doing another quick run through a case study? Can I get a smiley face or a clock if you're interested in doing another quick one? All right. Let's move to the next case study and let's take a look at this. And these are some different issues. Take a minute or two to read this case study D. All right, now let's think about the issues. If you're ready to move on to issues, can you give me a smiley face? Oh, Carol, he's still reading. Okay, so what's the real issue in this case study? Okay, where to allocate the available funds? What are the priorities? Prioritization on spending? I think there might always be more needs than money, but in this case, if there is money to utilize, how to sort that out as a team? All right, we're getting some good ideas in. All right, so where should this money go? Where should we advise? And also how should we advise? So I think we can agree that student achievement is really important, and that should be the priority. And that if not all students are being successful or good proportion are not being successful, then perhaps we should be talking specifically about how to be helpful. All right, we've got lots of feedback in the issues. So what would be our process? As soon as you're done typing, Carla will move on to process. Got some good ideas coming through surveying parents, voting, have each department pitch what they need and collectively decide. The nice to have and the need to have. All right, I've got a suggestion about focusing on the science curriculum, what's needed in order to be helpful. Ooh, I like this one from Ms. Flynn. Brainstorm evaluate prioritize. Sounds excellent. Cost and rationale is important. So we want to focus on the three-year plan as best we can and try to align with those goals so that we have a focus. All right, any last ideas? Thanks, Larissa, for Ready Fire Aim. All right, so there's some excellent ideas and it sounds like there's a lot of folks who've had this experience before. We absolutely want to recognize the issues that have come forward and acknowledge them and then talk about how can we work together to increase achievements and whether it's in the science curriculum or someplace else, what do we need to do as a group and making sure that we've got a lot of folks involved in this conversation, that it's not just a small group around the table. All right, excellent job everybody. I know this is very, very quick, but I really appreciate the fact that you've weighed in and for folks who are reading the screen and the chat window, I'm sure you're finding lots of good ideas as well or that they validate how you feel about the situation as well. All right, what we're going to do is we're going to move to some of the things that we can do, whether from a chair's position or from someone who is attending school council, to move our messages forward. If we have these kind of discussions, we want to make sure that they just don't stay there, that we take some action on them. So I'm going to slide to the next slide and talk about follow-up. We want to make sure that we capture clear information in our minutes and then we use that as a follow-up tool. So I've seen minutes where there's a box and then the box says action items. So for example, you've had this amazingly productive discussion on where to go next, but you haven't talked about how it's going to happen or who will take a lead. So we really want to make sure those minutes clearly indicate our expectations. The second thing we want to do is if new folks are getting involved, we want to offer assistance or we want to mentor them. We want to make sure we share the load, share the love of all the activities because sometimes we give busy people more tasks because we feel they can get them done. My feeling is that I like to share all my tasks so that we all have something to take away and that we're all invested. Sharing important meeting messages is around you may not want to share pages and pages of minutes necessarily, but you might want to do a quick bulletin of a couple of highlights about where we're going. So if it's about the issue of funding and how you've agreed to do things or if you want to make sure that parents are aware of issues around the school, find a way to have nice, clear, specific plain language messages. And lastly, make sure that we share the tasks, that we don't just look at the minutes and say, oh, look, Sandra has five or six items on the agenda to follow up for next meeting because we're really suggesting to someone that they could do it all and that the rest of us were okay to come back next time. We want to absolutely make sure that we can share the small tasks around so that everybody has something to do, a couple of things to do, or maybe just one thing to do and that gets us to the next meeting on time. All right. So let's talk about evaluation. This is one of those pieces that we maybe don't think about as much, but it can be really helpful. At some point after meetings, we need to talk about what we've accomplished. If we wait until the end of the year, we might not actually remember what we've accomplished or we might get lost in it. If we just talk about the little things like, wow, we saw four new faces out at this meeting and how did they get there? Did we do some great advertising? Did we connect with more school community members? Whatever it happens to be, you should be talking about that and thinking, this is what's helpful for us the next time around or we can build on it. You can also look at ways to improve. Now, there might be some little things. Maybe we want to have a more descriptive agenda so that folks know exactly what we're talking about when we want them to come to a meeting. And you can find out what's helpful by connecting with attendees and getting their feedback. I think people really like to hear, you know, what did you think? What would you like to see? And you can build that into the next agenda so that we're making the best possible choices going forward. At the end of the day, we want to have a balance. We want to have a productive meeting but we also want to enjoy the meeting too. And so, you know, making sure that people can talk in the meeting and be part of the conversation and that it's just not a push out of information, that can be really helpful. So, can I have a clap for anybody who does a bit of review after meetings even if it's your own personal reflection? Excellent. Oh, excellent. Good stuff. Oh, and I have high levels thinking about it. Okay, but that is really, really helpful. And one thing I want you to think, if you hadn't been doing anything around evaluation, pick one thing to do. Just even to sit down with a buddy and just talk about what did you see and hear in the meeting. And if you get a chance to connect with more people, that's even better. So, this might have been how you got to school council and if that was the case, then we're glad you're still here. But we want to bring folks through the door standing up, walking in, and excited. And, you know, in order to do that, we want to set the stage for them to have a good experience. And one of the ways to do that is engage people. Don't wait for engagement. Talk to people now. I'm always recruiting people. Matter of fact, I mean, I'll recruit people for pretty much anything and just ask any of my colleagues. And consider everyone a possibility. Even someone who doesn't maybe talk necessarily like they'd like to be involved, I still keep sharing the messages with them. And sometimes it seeps in that they might want to be there. For folks who are a little more timid, you might want to offer some training for some of the roles that they might want to play in the future and any mentoring. Because if you want people to take on tasks, they need to feel comfortable. I also really try to emphasize flexibility and creativity when it comes down to the roles that people play. I don't consider anything a standard role. So, co-chairs, assistants, support teams, groups, you name it. Or even just simple tasks that folks are able to go out and do independently. It's nice to know that folks will jump in if they feel comfortable. And lastly, I really like to see those contributions recognized so that everybody feels welcomed and want to be back. And they want to spend time with the council because they feel like they're in the right place. So, keep those recruitment plans handy and think every day is a good day to recruit. Now, as we move towards the conclusion of the formal part of the seminar and just before I invite Wendy to give you a tour of our website, I just want to tell you that it's one step at a time. So, if you've had some struggles with your council, don't think you have to do everything yesterday. It's always practicing. And I consider it just practice, practice, practice. And it's also not about getting perfect either. But you've got to pat yourself on the back. If you've taken some of these leadership roles on or you've waited in on discussions or helped out, then you know what, you're doing a great job. And other folks will want to work alongside you. And it is, as Larissa said, it's all worth the effort because at the end of the day, everyone is responsible for the leadership and school council. It's not just about one person. It's about all of us. So, what we're going to do now is I'm just going to go to our last slide here. Keep our numbers handy. We've got a lot of great material and we love to come face to face with folks. And we're just waiting into this side of doing work on webinars so you'll see more from us. And we also have a great link to our email so that you can, if you need something, we'd love to be of service and assistance. So, I know I wasn't able to answer all the questions throughout the sessions. This was a bit of a mind-boggle for me to see this amazing level of chat coming in. What I do hope is that you are learning from each other. And, you know, we hope that the presentation was helpful for context and give you some ideas. But we also hope that some of the things you saw from your colleagues really sparked some interest for you. I mean, it was absolutely fantastic and more than I could have ever hoped for, I have to tell you. But one thing that I really, really want to do is I want to introduce Wendy Kiefer. And Wendy is our Director of Client Services and she's my supervisor. And I've asked her to come and do a quick web tour because we want to engage you in some amazing resources. So, Wendy, are you out there? I am definitely here, Lisa. Nice job. All right. Thank you. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. This will be just a really quick tour. I would like to sort of link this part of the presentation for you this afternoon to a couple of the comments that we've seen coming through the chat boxes, et cetera, in the last little while about being able to Facebook, being able to network with other school councils around the province, being able to share ideas, being able to capture these conversations and being able to get ideas from other people other than the five or six that are sitting around our school council tables on a regular basis. So, what you should say, okay, I've got one question there. Maybe it's going to help me moderate that or not. It was just me. I just wanted to point out to people that in a minute you were going to be seeing a little window open on top of your sort of whiteboard area where the slides were. And what we're doing is we're watching Wendy's computer now. So, she's taking us to the Alberta School Council's Association website. And she's going to step us through a little process. So, you'll be able to see it. It's very normal when Wendy goes to a new page that it might take a second or two to load. But just let us know if you're having difficulty seeing it or anything and we can help you with that. Great. Thanks very much, Karla. And Karen, excellent question. What about setting up a chat form on the ACA website? Well, guess what? We have. Our website has been up since beginning of August. And that ability is there for you. So, hopefully you can all see in front of you what is known as the homepage for our website. And I'm going to walk you through the very quick and easy process of registering as a user on the website. In other words, setting up a user profile. So, you'll see here where we've got all sorts of neat things that you can see. But right down below here we've got a question that says, haven't registered yet. And what that means is you haven't registered as a user on our website. If you haven't already done that, what you will do is you will click on that little hyperlink there, which will take you to a screen which is going to ask you, okay, are you a school council or school community member, or are you an education community member? For any of you that are actively sitting around the table of a school council, you are a school council member. So, if you're a teacher rep, a principal, a parent, a grandparent, the appointed community rep, you are a school council member. If you are a trustee, a superintendent, an interested business owner, et cetera, from the community, you are the education community member. So, we're going to choose council, school council member for setting up this particular profile and hit the continue button. And we will then have some questions in here that are very easy to fill out. So, username, we are going to fill out a username today of P. King. First name being Pat, last name being King. And hit continue. You can use your own name in there, probably most easily identified if you want other school council members to find you, or you can use a pseudonymus, that's what you would prefer. Okay, so then you'll be asked to create a password. We're all familiar with that particular process because we have to do that, it seems on a daily basis with just about everything we do. And we'll all be asked to enter in an email address as well. And of course, the confirm what you've typed above so that there are no errors. And that's why we do it twice because sometimes we do type errors. Okay, so full name is Pat King. Pat King has been involved since the, we'll just hypothetically say the 15th month of September in 1994. Okay, AGM date for school councils, you can fill that in, that's really helpful for us. What kind of school type you have. If you're a public private charter, we're going to choose public for this. Or are you willing to engage the media? So often we get requests from various media outlets wanting to make comments on something major that's going on in the provincial education spectrum. If you are willing to engage the media and participate in that conversation, please indicate yes. If you indicate no, that's fine too. Is ECS taught at your school? Is elementary taught at your school? Is junior high taught at your school? Is senior high taught? What is your role? So are you a parent at the school council table? Are you a school council member? Are you the school council chair, et cetera? If you are the chair, please indicate so because that allows us to send you permissions to be able to be group administrator for your school council. You need to agree to our terms and conditions. You can definitely read those. I recommend that. And then enter the name of the school that you are affiliated with. And you can enter, obviously, more than one school if that's the case. You don't have to enter your address, et cetera. All of that information, that's entirely up to you, and that will be maintained in your profile. But please feel free to go ahead and skip that part if you'd like. We do need to enter the city or the town, so we'll do that right now. Okay. So we're going to submit that and see if I did that without any errors. If I do have errors in there, it will definitely flash a message out and you'll let me know that I need to go back and fill something out. Excellent. I was successful in registering. So now I want to find my school council that I am affiliated with. And you noted that I had typed in East Glen there. So I'm going to search for the group page in this site for my school council. I'm just going to type East Glen. Now, anytime anything is done with East Glen school or school council on the website, our website basically documents it. So there are a number of different pages within our website already that have East Glen as part of them. The one that we want to look for in order to join is the one that says school council, East Glen school, Edmonton. All these others are affiliated as well, but we want school council because we want to get to the group page. So if we click on that, that will bring up the group page for the school council for East Glen school here in Edmonton. As you can see, there are a number of notes that have been posted by myself there. I'm the chair for the school council. I have a couple of members. I've also got some pages in here, but first I want Pat King to join our group. So we're just going to click on the icon that says Join Group, verifying that that in fact is what Pat wants to do. Pat says yes to that. So she's now a member of the East Glen school council, and you'll notice that it says that on the group wall. As a chair, I've been able to upload a number of really important documents for our school council, the ones that we want to share with our greater school community. So we've got this particular section under important documents. We will have the new members invitation. We have school council operating procedures. We have a permission to contact form, and I'll see how it'll take to open up. This is the form that we distributed at the beginning of the year with all those forms that go home with every student, usually along with the school fees. And basically asks permission for us to contact parents, et cetera, with school council information. This is one that is distributed by Edmonton Public School Board. You can also create your own. We have one on the website called Family Engagement Form that asks similar questions and permission for the school council to contact parents directly, et cetera. Other important pages, et cetera, within this website, of course, are agendas and minutes. So agendas for meetings coming up and minutes for meetings that have occurred in the past. I have another question from... I'm sorry, it's from Carla Tannis. Tannis, do you want to go ahead with your question? She's asked, is your website part of the school website or is it separate? Because this is through the Alberta School Council's Association website, Tannis, this is separate from the school. So who tends it is the person that you determine on your school council or from your parent community who wants to have the administrator, we'll call them that, the administrator authorization. If the chair is too busy and really has a number of other things that they have to do or is quite hesitant to work around technology, it doesn't have to be the chair. We can give from the office here, we can give those privileges to any designated member of the school council. So that might be a position on your school council is who wants to be the person who tends our group page on the ASCA website. Certainly hope that's helped a little bit. Wendy, sorry to interrupt. There was just another question about, can we view your East Glen documents without being a member of the East Glen group? You can absolutely view the East Glen documents without being a member of the group. You do have to be a registered user on the site. So you do have to create a profile to be able to view those documents. But you can see those, you don't have to be a member of the group. So it's really important as school councils that whatever information you're posting up here, you need to understand is public information. So again, you are going to follow the rules of PIPA and not include full names necessarily. Unless you have permission to do that, you are going to be cautious and be cognizant of the fact that those documents are a public document. I'm sorry, you might be getting there too. There's just another question about people just wondering how you actually create a page on there. You might have been going there anyway. We do have actually an instruction document that we send out to the administrator of each of the groups that tells them how to create the page, how to upload the documents, all of that type of stuff. It's about a five-minute process. So it's not hugely time consuming, but it's also something that if you're not wanting to be the administrator of your group page, we're certainly not going to overload your mind with all of that information at this particular point in time. But as far as your school council page, your school council already has a page that's been created for it in our website. We've done that on our end. It's just up to you as a school council to go and find it and start populating it. I hope that helps. So further to that particular portion of our website, you can also go in and view a calendar, an upcoming calendar, et cetera. And you'll notice here when I flip back to our home, upcoming events. We've got the AGM for school council and parent association occurring on October 26. And if people click on that, it gives a little bit of an information as to what might be occurring at that AGM and where it is, and the nice little thing there too, a Google map as well. So I'll move away from the group school council group page right now and go back to the home page just to show you some of the other resources that we have for anybody who's interested in accessing them at this particular point in time. If you haven't had an opportunity yet to cruise through our website, you'll see down the right-hand side here, here's that school council resource manual that was referred to. It's there for you if you ever need it. You can click on any one of these along here and get tip sheets, templates, some training ideas, tutorials. Our five-minute static webcast, which will give you a summary of some of the topics that you might be interested in hearing about as a school council. We've got one for chairs. It's called chair basics. We've got one that very quickly describes the difference between a school council and a fundraising association, et cetera. We do have handouts that support most of the workshops that we have online at the moment, and we definitely will be uploading more as we go along. Yeah. David, do you want to go ahead? Oh, there it is. Oh, sorry. Mine's coming in quick and fast. Is there a way to browse all the groups that have been created rather than searching schools individually? At this point in time, no. You actually have to search by the school name in order to find out whether or not they've created, sorry, whether they've populated their school council webpage. Okay. I hope that answered that one for you, David. Some other resources, et cetera, that you might find useful. We've got some publications and reports on here, some guides as well to some successful school council practices, et cetera. We've also got our legal documents that we're required to have posted for you, our annual reports, our strategic plans, those kind of things. We've got some excellent links to some other resources across the province and across Canada that help to support school councils as well. So just about anything you ever wanted to know about school councils and didn't know where to ask, you should be able to find some sort of information for it on our website. If you don't find it, we are certainly wanting to assist you. So you can simply get in touch with us and ask us for some help. Now you can either request a workshop that comes directly to your school council at a date and time that works for you. And we have a number of topics again that you can choose from, that best fits your membership. You can request this particular service right online by filling out our online form and you get to choose the dates and times. And we'll assign an instructor to come out to you. If you are a member of the association, either through your school council or through your jurisdiction, our site services are free of charge. If you're not a member of the association, give me a call. We'll discuss that. The workshops do come with a price tag, but I'll tell you that the membership is far more affordable and you'll probably want to do that. Okay. So any questions at all about the website that I might be able to answer for someone? Not at this time? Excellent. I'll turn the mic back over then to Lisa and she can conclude our time together. There was just one question about how long those pages have been operational. People are just wondering how long they've been around. This version of the website, this was brand new to us as far as the interactive website opening up on August 1st, actually. So very new. Still lots of things that we're learning, still lots of things that we're developing in the background to make it a great venue for school councils to be able to not only work within their own school council but to work with school councils across the province. There's another question about the cost. I believe it's free to join, but you're just saying you can pay for a membership again. Do you want to clarify that? Certainly. To join the website, there is no cost to join your school council group page. There is no cost. That's absolutely free to. The cost that comes in is either for having our instructors come out on site and to do a workshop with your school council and if you're not a member, then there is a cost for that. If you want to become a member, it's a $40 fee per year or sometimes your school board or school jurisdiction will pay for all school councils in this jurisdiction to be members. Anything else? All right. That sounds great, Wendy. Thanks very much for giving us a tour and also a real peek into an amazing resource. Absolutely welcome. Before we do our final closing little part or anything, early on in the webinar, Bruxton Park School had commented about a roving school council and we had a lot of questions, people asking what that was, but we were kind of onto a different topic. I asked if they could elaborate a little bit later. Would you mind, Lisa, if they took the mic and told us a little bit about that? No, that would be great. We've got a couple of minutes to do that. I'm just going to shut my mic off. Bruxton Park School, you're going to need to click on the microphone icon below the participant list of names and when it goes yellow, then you can start talking. Go for it and I'll shut mine off so we don't get any feedback. Okay, hopefully you can hear us now. We'll turn it over to Ron Deschamps, our school council chair. Hello, everybody. What we do for our roving school council meeting is we've created a passport with about eight sections on it and we have a prize donated for all the people that participate to enter in this draw and what people do is they move from station to station and at each station there's a question posted. In the past, we have used the resolutions from ASCA for the AGM. We have also used some questions that have come out of our division or questions that pertain specifically to our school. We do it during our parent-teacher interview nights because that's when a lot of parents are in the school and they will move from station to station and collect a sticker on their passport for each of the questions and when they've completed it and given us their input, they put it into the draw for the prize at the end. We've also used information about the whole thing on our school site that's here on ASCA and anyone can access it if they would like to. Thanks very much. Thanks very much. Yeah, it's really wonderful to be able to hear