Sandra Tovar

Intro to Education
April 13, 2016
School Board Meeting Reflection

The board meeting that I attended did not touch base on many issues that are going on in
schools and the schools community. I attended a district 33 school board meeting and although
they had interesting topics it was not as exciting as I thought it would be, especially in a school
community where they have implemented different ideas and taken some aspects away to better
the district as a whole. The board meeting mainly focused in adding a system to rate teachers of
ten years or more, and those that are beginning to teach for the district. The meeting opened with
a small and brief discussion about adding social workers to the district - which was what I found
most interesting part of the meeting - they had a former social worker who used to work for the
district open the statement and parents from the community shared their own testimonies about
why there should be an addition of social workers for the district. These two topics were the only
two that stood out throughout the meeting, it would have been more appealing in my opinion if
there were more topics that they would have touched on. The way that the meeting was set up
and the area where these board meeting take place is intimidating, and there are only a handful of
people who attend the meetings, which is odd to me because I always thought that all teachers
and/or principals of schools were required to attend the school board meetings. It was different
experience but it is something that I would attend in the future as a teacher or a parent.
This school board meeting focused mostly on local issues in the school and one of them was
implementing social workers for the schools of that district. This topic I found very comforting
to hear about, I attended school in district 33 and growing up there was a lot of negativity from

student to other students but it was difficult for teachers or other workers of the school to solve
these problems with very few social workers who went from school to school on different days
and occasions. I do think that bullying in school still goes on and due to this there are many
students in schools who have a hard to cope with school without being provided the necessary
help from an expert who can assure that the student can recover from incidents that they face in
school. They had two parents speak about the issue, and I feel like this is an example of how the
district operated at local level; the two parents shared their own experience about the issue and
how it was or did affect their son or daughter. The issue pertained to this district only and many
had successfully agreed on adding social workers for all schools of district 33, which makes this
topic something that was a local level issue. There was the coordinator of the curriculum who
introduced a new system that would be added for the next school year, this topic was at a local
level but many of the additions of that new system were part of the state mandates that the state
of Illinois has added to their education policies. The way that the topic was set up was interesting
to listen about since it required a lot of work from both the observer and the person who will be
observed. Both topics took over the meeting and it was very helpful to listen to some of the
information provided from the members of the committee and some of the parents from the
district.
There were many parents who attended and who are also part of the committee which is good
to see, because there are parents who are becoming involved with their sons or daughters
school, I think that many schools lack involved parents and to have parents that are involved
makes the process easier since they are the ones who are aware of what is missing or needs to go
from the schools district or the general curriculum.