The School Advisory Council Year in Review

June 26, 2019June 25, 2019 communications Community News, Eco-team, Enrichment, Events, Fundraising, Greening, SAC Announcement, Social Justice newsletter

What is the School Advisory Council (SAC)?

The SAC is made up of parents and guardians from the Dovercourt community who work with the school on different issues and activities. These include student achievement, enrichment, curriculum goals and priorities, school budget priorities, school safety, renovation plans, after school activities, and criteria for selection of new principals.

We also run many events throughout the year that help bring the community together as well as raise essential funds to support student learning. Events include the dance-a-thon, movie nights, math night, winter feast, and of course the Spring Fling. The funds that we raise through these events are invested back into the school, supporting arts, athletics, technology and so much more (including all the pizza we provide at most school events).

The work of the SAC happens in many different ways, but one way is through our monthly evening meetings in the staff room (2019-2020 dates TBA). These meetings are an opportunity for parents and guardians to hear what’s happening at Dovercourt, make their voice heard, and plan activities. All are welcome! You do not need to hold an official position to attend and contribute at meetings.

School Community Gatherings

This year we kicked off the year once again with the Welcome Back Breakfast in September. SAC organized this breakfast using SAC funds for all families to celebrate the new school year, and particularly to welcome new Kindergarten and Grade 7 families. Thank you for your donations of food and for joining us to usher in a new school year!

The TDSB Parents Reaching Out Grant provided funds for Dovercourt’s first ever Family Math Night in October of 2018! This event reached over 60 families and saw our Grade 7/8 students take on a leadership role, running stations. Great work! Math as a theme was chosen in response to our parent/guardian survey in 2017/18 and because improving numeracy skills was also a priority in Dovercourt’s School Improvement Plan. School Improvement Plans are developed by schools with guidance from the central TDSB. Our principal and vice principal regularly share the work that staff are doing in support of the plan at our monthly SAC meetings. If you can make it, drop into a meeting next year to find out more!

In February, to beat the winter blues, the SAC hosted the Winter Feast. This annual potluck brings together Dovercourt families to share in community and laughter, bringing a little light to the dark days of winter. This year the SAC worked together with Dovercourt’s Student Council to provide nail art, face painting and games for younger students. We look forward to building on this great Dovercourt tradition next year!

This year we also hosted a movie night in January, screening The Incredibles 2. Mats were spread around the gym, popcorn and pizza was served, and this year we learned that lemonade and gym floors don’t mix!

Lastly, we hosted our annual Spring Fling at the beginning of June. As always, it was quite a party–everywhere you looked, families were bouncing, playing, bike-decorating, face-painting, crafting, climbing, raffling, eating, shopping, bidding, jamming, performing, dancing and having a great time!

Community Engagement

This year we hosted several guest speakers at our monthly SAC meetings. In the Fall, Amina Vance, a local high school student, came to ask for council’s support in the student response to the government’s repeal of the physical and sexual health curriculum. Maggie Hutchinson requested SAC support for the Build a Better Bloor Dufferin movement to ensure that the new high school being built at Dufferin and Bloor reflects community needs and projected growth. Details of these presentations can be found in the November minutes from our SAC website.

For the first time in many years, we were delighted to fill our Community Representative position on SAC and welcomed Katie Kwaczek from Oasis Dufferin Community Centre to provide a community voice at our meetings. SAC would like to thank Oasis for once again sharing their kitchen space and assets with us to make this year’s Spring Fling a big success. Our Grade 7/8 student council led a successful community campaign in support of the Oasis Emergency Food bank by participating the Coldest Night of the Year Walk. Thanks to all who turned out to support them!

This year we also started inviting our Grade 7/8 School Council to join our monthly SAC meetings. They were AMAZING! It was great to hear what the students were up to and how we could support them. Their presence resulted in some great collaborations on events this year and we look forward to continuing this tradition next year. Thank you to all our students who gave some of their time to join us and congratulations to this year’s Grade 8 graduates!

School Concerts

This year SAC supported our Winter, Spring, and Kindergarten concerts once again by providing pizza free of charge by using funds from SAC fundraising efforts. Thank you to all those who donated baked goods, fruit and veggies to round out this offering, and to families and students who volunteered to set up, serve, and clean up. A special thanks to our snack program for sharing leftovers with us for these concerts too!

In previous years we have charged money for pizza and used these nights as a way to fundraise for the school. Starting in 2017-2018 we decided to utilize the benefits of our big fundraisers to make it easier for parents and guardians to come see their children perform. Do you think we should keep providing food free of charge at concerts? Does it make a difference for you and your family? Let us know on: chair.dovercourtcouncil@gmail.com

We’d love to offer different foods if we keep doing this and if you want to help us with this – please get in touch!!

Enrichment

The School Advisory Council provides targeted support for the arts at Dovercourt by giving each teacher $10/student to participate in arts activities. This year some of these funds supported taking students to places like Roy Thompson Hall and Roseneath Theatre for example!

The SAC also organizes, but does not fund, extra-curricular activities at the school to provide a simple way for the school community to access a wide range of programming. This year we welcomed Action Potential, Mad Science, Lunch Hour Music, Bricks4Kids and more for after school or lunch hour programming.

This past year also saw the first ever Pay-What-You-Can (PWYC) model for extra-curricular activities. In line with the TDSB’s equity focus in the multi-year plan, SAC this year reviewed whether all students were benefiting from extra-curricular activities offered at the school. We piloted a PWYC model for the lunch hour music program open to grades 4-8 with a long standing community service member, Adam Silver, this Spring. Thanks to all who participated and shared their feedback.

Communication

This year the SAC worked hard to improve our reach to parents/guardians at the school.
Our communications rep put together a fabulous weekly newsletter (which most readers of this end of year report have been enjoying). Thank you Dan! If you are not getting this weekly newsletter, please sign up here.

This year we also conducted a broad Parent Involvement & Interest Survey online and in person on curriculum night in the Fall reaching nearly 100 parent/guardians. From this we learned that there is not a strong will to have a Dovercourt School Advisory Council presence on social media, that nearly everyone who replied to the survey strongly agreed it was important for them to be involved in the school to support student success, and that almost all respondents strongly agreed they felt welcome and accepted at the school. The survey also told us we should try to communicate better what SAC is, what we do, and share where funds are being allocated (hence this newsletter!).

We are still looking for school community members who can translate some basic SAC materials into any of the following languages: Amharic, Vietnamese, Hungarian, Korean, Punjabi, Arabic or Tagalog. If you write in any of these languages and could help translate one item in the 2019-2020 school year, please contact us on chair.dovercourtcouncil@gmail.com

Dovercourt Public School Garden and Community Pollination Project

In the spring of 2018 several parents and teachers started a Garden Club at Dovercourt. We had 50 children come in the first few weeks and spent most of that first season cleaning up the school gardens including Hallam Street. The highlight was the installation of a butterfly garden on Bartlett Street and seeing the butterfly population visit.

This year, the SAC with principal support applied for a grant through TD Friends of the Environment Foundation. We are thrilled to report that and we received it! These funds give us the opportunity to tackle our goals of:

Planting many new pollinator-friendly plants in our gardens along Hallam
Street and in front of the main yard
Providing the garden club with new tools and materials
Supporting the school at large with education and materials to use our
outdoor space for student learning and enjoyment

Would you like to be part of this project this summer? We are looking for a group of parents/guardians/neighbours to help us a few hours a week this summer to do weeding, watering, planting, picking up garbage. Children are welcome!

We are also looking for a Landscape Architect /Landscape Contractor in the area who can help us develop a sustainable plan and support us with some of the labour-heavy tasks.

We would love to hear from you at DovercourtGardenClub@gmail.com

-Deborah Walsh & Samantha Ling

Fundraising

With the increasing gaps in government funding for education, unfortunately the need for SAC to raise funds to enhance programs and support school initiatives feels more pressing each year.

In October we held our annual Dance-a-thon which gets the whole school moving during the school day and raises funds for the school community. We raised a whopping $4700 this year and a huge thank you goes out to our events team and teachers and administration for organizing this and our school community for making it such a success!

We also held another Flip Give program this year where a percentage of gift cards purchased for Indigo Books gets flipped back to the school. This year we raised $947 in support of purchasing books at our school library.

Lastly, but not least, we also held our annual Spring Fling! While the dust is still settling, it looks like the 2018-2019 Spring Fling was our best fundraising event ever, bringing in just over $15,000 to help support our kids over the coming years. A huge thank you to all of the families, teachers, students, administrators and community business and not-for-profit partners who come together to support this tradition.

Fundraising dollars are spent to support student achievement and well being in our school. Over the past two years, SAC has helped to improve a lot of the IT equipment at the school, spending almost $10,000 on desktops, laptops, Chromebooks, tablets, wi-fi signal boosters, etc. to supplement the budget line the school has for technology. As mentioned earlier we also use these funds to support arts enrichment programming for every student during the school day and this year supported a trial pay-what-you-can music program extracurricular activity. SAC funds are used to pay for the pizza and popcorn we make available free to families at our events and they support the Reading Challenge parties and prizes. We also support Winter Alternatives Day by funding the busing costs for all of the offsite activities each year. Of course there’s also the supplies we need to maintain, from plates, cutlery and cups for serving food at events, through to new tables and this year, a new popcorn machine. Finally, we pay for the police checks required for volunteers to help out in our school! Come to a SAC meeting next year to find out more about this process and give your input!

Advocating for Quality Education

This year the School Advisory Council also responded to the education cuts the current government has made to the Toronto District School Board. This year the TDSB faced a $67.8 million dollar shortfall in their budget for 2019-2020, which encompassed a $42.1 million dollar cut in funding from the Ministry of Education and a budget deficit of $25.7 million dollars. More information about this is available on the TDSB website. The SAC approved and sent letters to the government objecting to the cuts to education as well as a letter to our own school staff offering our solidarity in the fight for quality education for our students.

We will be sending a letter to the Ministry outlining some of the purchases we have made with fundraising dollars to advocate for more school funding across the board. Different schools in different neighbourhoods are able to raise different amounts of money to support their schools. There are regulations around what fundraised money can and can’t be spent on, but we know the impact of our fundraising on the experience of our students at our school. The TDSB report from last year illustrates how different the fundraising capacity is between schools across the board – from $6-7 per student at some schools up to $1,600 per student at others. The SAC believes in a strong public education system that provides universally accessible quality education for all. We will continue to raise our voice to advocate for adequate funding for each school in the system to support things like arts programming and technologically ready institutions.

Of course, SAC is not the only avenue for parents, grandparents and guardians to make an impact at Dovercourt:

Did you know?

The Sensory Room at Dovercourt has been a work in progress since 2017 when Judith Kramer and some parents from the school began discussing how to create a space in the school that was dedicated to mental health and self-regulation.

The sensory room concept has been embraced by the new principal, Caitland Ellis who has expanded on that vision of a space for conflict resolution, self-care, reflection, quiet work or self-regulation by incorporating the sensory room into the daily programming of the classroom support team.

The sensory room now has a schedule and operates as an open space where any kid from any classroom can go and find a caring support teacher who can help them to work independently, resolve a dispute with a classmate or take a break if they are experiencing stress or anxiety.

Sensory Rooms are meant to be spaces that respond to a physical need that the body might have which is not being met in a traditional classroom.

Dovercourt is very lucky to have this space which is dedicated to the emotional and mental health of our students.

-Carla Mundwiler

Who is the SAC?

The SAC consists of voting and non-voting positions:

Voting Positions:

Chair/Co-Chair: This role provides oversight and leadership to all members, sets meeting agendas/chairs meetings, and works closely with school staff and administration to provide support where needed.

Treasurer: The treasurer is responsible for managing the SAC funds using acceptable and transparent accounting methods.

Secretary: The Secretary is responsible for taking minutes at SAC meetings and works with the Chair(s) to provide meeting minutes to SAC members and the school community.

Vice Chair/Community Outreach: The Vice-Chair/Community Outreach representative will be responsible for representing the School community’s perspective in the wider community generally, and more specifically at the Ward Council and with the local Trustee.

Event Coordinator: Event coordinators lead on SAC-organized activities (e.g. dance-a-thon, winter/spring festival, Spring Fling, etc.).

Volunteer Coordinator: The volunteer coordinator is responsible for assessing the school’s need for parent volunteers throughout the year and at specific events, and creating and maintaining a volunteer network.

Greening/Eco Team Representative: The Greening/Eco Team representatives are responsible for enhancing the environmental awareness of the school community and supervising the school’s outdoor green initiatives. A key task is maintaining the school’s official ECO status.

Health and Safety Representative: The Health & Safety representative works with the caretakers, teachers and principal concerning general safety issues around the school.

Enrichment Representative: The Enrichment representative works with teachers, the principal and SAC to develop ideas on field trips, extra-curricular activities and educational programs.

Division Representative*: This role oversees the class reps in their division (Kindergarten, Primary, Junior and Intermediate), ensuring strong and consistent communication between classrooms and families. *= new role, will start Fall 2019

Communications Representative: The communications representative is responsible for SAC’s communication newsletter/website.

Non-Voting Positions:

Class Representatives: Class representatives help to spread information about school and SAC events, outreach for donations and volunteers for SAC events, as well as communicate to SAC any issues or concerns raised by class parents and guardians. Class reps also help to engage those who cannot regularly attend or follow SAC activities during the year.

A final note from the 2018-19 Co-Chairs

It’s been a privilege and an honour to work with the amazing teachers, admin, families and students at Dovercourt this year. Watching our community come together to celebrate, advocate, learn, and just have fun has been a joy.

As we look toward next year, we wanted to say a sincere thank you to everyone who has contributed and participated in making our school community such a vibrant and exciting place. See you in September!

–Roxanne Wright & Hilary Hall, 2018-2019 Co-Chairs

Dovercourt Public School S.A.C.

… bringing together parents and guardians from the Dovercourt community

Fundraising