Meeting Attendees
Eric Ebeling
Marcia Casey, Head Start
Lori Iverson, GTNP
Steve Whisenand, TC Library
Diane McGee, GTNP
Suzanne Biermann, The Learning Center

Jonathan began by giving an introduction. Along with NRCC & the Chamber of Commerce, Charture is running this project. Hopefully everyone has had a chance to skim the 2004 education report. The idea of the “legacy question” is crucial to the project. We are trying to explore the fundamental question of what the qualities of JH are that we would like future generations to continue to enjoy. What are those qualities? How do we know if we are sustaining them? We broke the community into 12 areas, education being one of them, and asked ourselves, “what do we really know?” Hopefully there is some overlap between what we know and what the community ideals are. As a starting place, we’d like to ask ourselves what we know about education. In order to learn about education, we wanted to gather those in the education field in JH. We wanted a structured way to gather information. Our goal is to “vacuum” up knowledge about education. There are three questions. First, where are we? What is the state of education in TC? The second question is looking at where we want to be. We will start talking about the statement of ideal, which is a way of framing the legacy issue. The third meeting will connect where we are and where we want to be. Are there things that the education folks could work together on to move the community along? The first meeting will involve self-introductions. After this, we will use last year’s report and ask the group for reactions.

The filtering mechanism that we use for this process in general is pretty simple: if you were going to give a 10-minute data driven presentation about your organization, what would you tell the community? What is really needed in JH is a factual base for opinions to build upon. What do you measure? What do you care about? The idea informing the chapter is if you as a group were to make a short presentation to the community at-large, what should the community know about the state of education in JH? Last year, the report was a little abstract in that there wasn’t a fear factor. This year, we will be holding a one-day conference at the end of Oct. The highlight of this conference will be group presentations to the community by each working group. We want to make our website the repository for all things we know about JH. The education chapter is distilled into the 10-minute “important to know” stuff. The rest of the information is in the appendix. There is a lot of information out there, and it is available free online. One of the homework pieces is to give us information about your organization- what do you do? What do you know? What would you like to know?
Suzanne Biermann, The Learning Center: They serve birth-5 years old. They have a special education and early education center. They are seeing explosive growth in the number of kids on their waiting list for early childhood education, including infant toddler programs and preschool programs. They are constrained by JH in terms of facilities and capacity. They have good programs and teachers and a more stable work force in terms of teaching. They operate with Latino families, and the School District (50% of infant-toddler slots are saved for school district employees to help with retention of staff). They also do family support- GED, mental health, etc. They secured a couple of grants to help with this. Childcare for parent meetings has gone up to 100%. They have 6 different sites in Jackson alone. As money comes available, they can secure new collaborations. March 1 they opened a new classroom for Head Start. They face challenges because they are not on one campus.

The LC has over 45 staff in TC (65 in TC & Sublette). Suzanne noted that other providers of preschool services were not reflected in this report (i.e. CCP, the Pumpkin Patch, home providers). Looking at research regarding structured preschool- kindergarten readiness, for example, how many kids are ready for kindergarten once they get into the school system? They do collect data re: kindergarten readiness; their scores have increased since the introduction of the Head Start program. The investment made in early childhood cost is missing- how much of public v. private dollars go towards education? She suspects that it is much more private then public. We are relying more and more on private $$$ (grant-seeking). Local governments don’t have funds or focus for this. You don’t hear anything about the health and social services safety net. We are a resort community- many more low income folks are coming here (immigrants, and people wanting a good life). There is a socioeconomic divide. Those that are here are having trouble. They don’t qualify for our programs, but have lived here for quite a number of years. They can’t afford quality preschool. If you are really poor you are going to get help. If you are a working family, it is no man’s land. It happens a lot nationwide. It’s very concentrated here, which is a huge problem as we build the town. Housing and childcare and early childhood education is important- we have all of these bedroom communities that bring their kids here because they are working here. They want them in this community for their education.

Janine said that we need to address the changing demographics of what is going on here.
Jonathan reacted: we divided JH into 12 parts, though we realize that nothing stands alone. Suzanne, for example, was talking about human services related issues. We are fully cognizant that these are arbitrary distinctions, and there is overlap. Part of the philosophy informing this process is that a lot of community development efforts have been top-down. The totality of the community can be overwhelming. Our hope is that if we do this for a few years, we will make a lot of progress in terms of thinking of things with data. Then we can start making connections. At the SJH conference, the general layout of the conference will be an opening set of remarks- demographics, socioeconomics. Then each of the 12 groups will give their presentation. Then each of the 8 major public bodies will give a “state of my jurisdiction” speech. In the afternoon, we will try to take some baby steps towards integration. The goal is to react to what everyone has heard. Appreciating that the distinctions are arbitrary, the long-term plan is to get at that. The second thing is that the education appendix may contain additional information. The information that ended up in the chapter passed through two thresholds- did the group think it was important? Is there data out there? We didn’t know the number of daycare providers (Suzanne does have this info). If you guys don’t have the data, we cannot do data gathering or original research. We are the collators. Knowing what we need to know is critical as well (see the wish list, IV in the 2004 chapter). He encourages the group to identify the things that are important to know, with the caveat that we don’t have time to develop new research. Hopefully in future years we can develop funding services for independent research projects.

Marcia keeps track of the Head Start data; she works with the Learning Center.

Janine Teske is on the board of the TCSD. She noted that the report would be a helpful document to have. She lobbied for financing for the School District. Anything that she can put on the shelf will help in credibility. Looking at the wish list, a lot of stuff is fairly elementary and we just need to figure out how to look at it.

Steve Whisenand is representing the library, and he works in adult education. He sees his role as helping with reference questions. If there is more to the wish list, he can set the reference team to work on finding the information. Other than that, he will contribute data from the library- computer classes, living wills presentations, etc. which may or may not be applicable to what we are doing here. Jonathan asked Steve if he were to make a presentation about the Library, what would he offer? Patrons? Books? Things that are important would be great, and he would ask everyone to do this initial filtering of their data. Our ideal would be several years of time series data (which may be a big hurdle). Any kind of info is important, ideally quantified or in a spreadsheet. We will present this info to the group. Steve has a ton of statistics as their funding is dependent on it.

Eric Ebeling is a substitute teacher, and has substituted for the last 9 years. Substitutes generally have just 1-2 days a week in the classroom. He has questions and anxieties every day. He thinks he has been in every classroom in the district over 9 years. In February, he was asked to take over a classroom on a longer basis, and with this opportunity, he is trying to decide how much his anxieties are justified and how little they have been placated. He thinks that there are observations worthy of the public situation that he might be able to contribute. Jonathan commented that we had a parent or two last year. What we tried to do is set up a safe place- we are trying to create an atmosphere of what you do, and an appreciation for what you do. We are trying to cut some of the politics out of it.

Diane McGee is the Education Specialist at GTNP, for just over a year. She was hired to determine whether the park should proceed with an outreach education program. Lori also provides education, but as far as a bigger picture kind of thing it’s not a formal program. She spoke to 19 different organizations, 21 people total, who offer programs similar to what the park would offer- cultural (historic) and natural resource education. It is very difficult to get quantitative data, which is a message she took home last year. Keeping statistics on special programs that they do is really important. She has some numbers this year of contacts she has made over the course of the last year. Part of her project is to justify continuing to have this program, and support existing programming. There are a lot of organizations offering programs. She looked at different audiences to identify those that are not well-served, so that the park can be more informed, and also to foster partnerships and collaboration. She is looking forward to figuring out how the park can fit into the education scene in TC.

Jonathan added that if we had not repeated the process this year, last year would have been a failure. We put together a repository of information, but to talk about legacies it has to be an ongoing process. It allows us to think small, if you will. Part of last year was trying to get 100 different organizations to think about measurement. This year, we are actually measuring stuff. For a lot of organizations to think about it, that is a big step forward. Hopefully this will snowball. People will get a better sense of what is going on in TC. It’s a huge project, but hopefully we can build on things over time.

Lori Iverson, GTNP. In her previous career she was a schoolteacher in the TCSD. She left that to work in the FMO in GTNP. GTNP was one of 16 parks to receive to a fire education, prevention, and information specialist. She took a non-existing, or latent, program and built it from the ground. There was quite a bit of education going on, through open houses, presentations, etc, but it wasn’t formal. She has started keeping statistics. One key component of the national fire plan is accountability- what is the FMO producing? It is frustrating- no one knows what to do with this. She writes success stories regarding collaboration, a key part of the Teton Interagency Fire Program (shared resources with BTNF and JH EMS). She does not measure education, just the contacts she has. She can set up a bulletin board at a prescribed fire, but she has no way of knowing how many people read it. She is constantly struggling with people who need numbers. Diane and Lori can talk about what is going on with local, state and federal agencies. They are trying to communicate, and pushing the programs a little farther- more than show-and-tell.

Jonathan said that one part of this process is being extremely respectful of everyone’s time. Our commitment is that we have 3 meetings, less than 2 hours. We may not get as far in the process as we would like. At the end of the third meeting, our goals are to have gathered new data, filtered it as to whether it is important for the community to know. Then our job is to update the report, so whoever gives the speech at the conference in October will have a good outline of what their talk is going to be. We anticipate being done by June. Then we will send out drafts to everyone and hope to publish the final report by Labor Day. It will be in circulation a month before the conference. These meetings will be packed with stuff. One of the real values last year is that the conversations went off in interesting directions- what is education, for example? Jonathan’s job is to try to keep it on track.

Janine asked about how many students come back to TC after they have finished their education. We don’t have any idea. Suzanne said that the governor used some statistics, WY wide. Janine said that PEC is doing some surveys. Jonathan said that anything that is of interest to you guys is of interest to us. There is no way we could ever decide what is important to know. Any of the stuff you think is important, if you have data to illuminate it, it’s even better.

The filtering mechanism was the presentation to the community. In terms of the things we actually know about TC, there were a few different categories: primary education (K-12); continuing education; adults with college degrees. In each of these cases, we tried to present the data and any rationale for the data. There is very little about pre-K in here. This was in part a function of the data we had. What he would like to do is go over what we actually have here, and ask whether there are things that jump out; should we add or delete things? There are some things that might be relegated to the appendix. There is a larger discussion about education- one thing that came up last year was how many people are tutoring- apparently there is a lot of growth in this business. Or individual guitar, or painting teachers. The default definition of education was more of a formal, institution-oriented definition. Perhaps we should expand that definition. What is appropriate when you consider the definition of education?

Janine said that looking at the cultural of element of Jackson, music is important for example. Jonathan agreed, is this in the arts group? Wine appreciation? Cooking classes? Where do you draw the line?

Janine said that if there is no data there, you just bail out. Lori struggles because they have an opportunity to create tremendous change. Last Thursday night, for example, they had an open house. The educational process, on defensible space, for example- is having a huge impact on the community, but the only numbers they have are those who showed up at the open house.

Jonathan said that part of it was a function of the people who were there, and what we actually know. Education is pretty broad, so as we work through this, share your thoughts.

Looking at IIIa, the group felt that it was important to know enrollment in the public schools and the Journeys School. Are there other entities we should include (such as the Christian schools?) We have data from the Community School this year.

Janine thinks that it is important for public education, everyone’s dollars is going to support this. If we are going to show that, we need to show the Journeys School, the Community School, etc.- all of the resources providing K-12 education, including the bible school, and the Kindergarten at the Catholic church. Suzanne said that she was looking at this as public, private, and pre-school. It is very interesting, especially if we had more data. She will coordinate with the other pre-K schools to get info. Suzanne said that it is great we have the numbers, but is there a way to know where the kids are from- TC? Or bedroom communities? Jonathan said that if you can break it down into outlying communities we would happily take it. Suzanne has friends near Bedford who go to this high school. Is this increasing because people are moving here?

Jonathan noted that it is a reflection of what we think is important. If we have the data, great. Diane asked if we ever found out what info the TCSD collected in their consulting job last year. Jonathan asked Janine about the person that they had hired from the outside to do a statistical analysis to be published last fall. Janine said that they hired him more for the regional cost of living; it was not focused on students, but on teacher turnover and cost of living.

Suzanne said that she can get data on the number of children served. The census data compares capacity available compared to the need. It is not so much as issue in public education. It becomes more of an issue on the continuing and early education realms. Jonathan hopes we can come back in a year, and we can show improvements through collaborations. In that same spirit, one of his hopes for the larger conference is that we can identify things related to education & human services, we can work on cross-disciplinary action items. The capacity stuff likely has implications to start sparks flying. Diane said that this is an issue with the non-profits- there are always capacity issues. TSS has a huge waiting list. Diane should pay attention to this when she reaches capacity issues. Jonathan added that the final piece is that part of this is setting up competitiveness. It would show people what could be done.

Janine thinks if you want to drive change, the way to do it is to show people data. They had one clip of data regarding all-day kindergarten increasing 1st grade readiness. The ability to drive change would be increased if you had data to show people.

Suzanne said they need structure-based preschool, and compare kids in structure-based programs v. those that didn’t. Eric’s question was regarding the statement of ideal- is the student getting the type of education that the student and parent wants? Interested parties could ultimately answer that completely affirmatively and still not know a lot. This speaks to what, as a community, we are supplying educationally. From his experience, it doesn’t answer what we produce. This may be a public school question. This is a huge question, but he doesn’t know how to measure it. We need to determine how many high-school graduates need remedial work in a 4-year school, for example. What caliber of academic rigor are we delivering, even if the student leaves TC? The question about students coming back is valuable but complicated- are they returning when they are 22? Or when they are 35? How do we evaluate what we are delivering with the public dollar to the public student?

Jonathan noted that this is a transition to WYCAS test scores. How do we determine how well the district is doing, or how well any school is doing in educating kids? The WYCAS test scores seemed like the easiest way to do this.

Janine said that they want ever kid to be first or second in line for whatever vocation they choose. One of the pieces of data is the number of students that leave for college or vocational programs. Then you get into snob appeal- how many stay in WY, or leave for top universities. There is some relevant data that is relatively easy to secure- ACT & SAT testing. These two pieces of data would help with the high school kids. They do know about how many kids are going where. She is not sure how you would display the data. Eric asked how long they are tracked. Janine said that it is until he or she graduates. Public Education Coalition has interviewed post-grad students.This is a local group that pays for teacher education programs). Eric thinks that this is where the real information gap begins- after commencement. What have we produced? How do we measure this?

Jonathan asked if it is important to have the numbers of people going through the K-12 system. A2 tries to get at how good a job we are going. The threshold was what percentage of kids was proficient or highly proficient. This was done for no other reason then we didn’t have any other way to do it.

Lori asked what we are measuring. Is the person who leaves more successful then someone who stays here? If you look at SAT or ACT, it’s looking at content rather then choices. Some of the things we are talking about don’t have to do with success or increasing your knowledge.

Suzanne said that it’s sort of like cleaning house- what is available? This year is rearranging the house- what is the state of education? We will get a more robust agreement of what we can track. The next step is what difference does this make? You need to correlate enrollment to something. The next question (buying new furniture) is what does that mean? What is success? Then, we can begin defining more mature indicators. In a smaller community we are trying to build this stuff, but you can’t build until you have a foundation.

Eric asked Lori if it was a valuable question (regarding what happens after commencement). Lori thinks it is, but is not sure how they correlate. Janine said that there is a direct link in industry between starting salaries and where you went to college.

Jonathan thinks that it is almost inevitable that the question will arise- how well are the kids you are pushing through the system doing? It is a valid answer to say that we don’t know- there aren’t meaningful ways of evaluating it. It’s going to be vague one way or another. We do need an indicator, even if it isn’t a good one. WYCAS might not be the most satisfying answer, but at least it tells us something. What other measurements are out there? College test scores? Janine said that at the last board meeting, this discussion came up. One of the things that they talked about is how many children were able to get into their first choice college. Eric said that if you can generate these metrics, parents and taxpayers can make up their own minds. We don’t have to define impact, value, or importance. We can supply something more than there is now. Janine does not think that we have the ability to ask whether they were prepared for college once they are there. A lot of what they have is hearsay or anecdotal.

Suzanne said that as a parent, one of the biggest things when moving to a new area is education. Your housing dictates where the good education is. To the extent we can provide qualified information, this is providing valuable info to the community. She would like to see SAT scores, the kindergarten readiness scores. The whole realm of the age of child you may have, it answers the question as to whether you move here, stay here, and whether your business will invest in the community.

Jonathan asked Janine to provide what is available; we can filter it at the next meeting.

Jonathan asked about A3- school district high school drop out rate. The question is, “how important is this?”

Diane said that this tries to answer the question of how successful we are. Steve asked what happened to the other 16%. Depending on how you define it, apparently they only count drop outs in the senior year- there are pretty interesting gymnastics in calculating this number.

Diane said that we talked about getting more at this qualitatively- if they dropped out, is there anywhere catching them? To make these jumps statistically, it’s not possible. Eric said that we built a $25 million high school, we are spending $9,000/per student.

Teacher experience and turnover: the thinking here is that it takes a few years to get up to stride as a teacher. If you have high turnover or lack of experience, it is probably an indicator that kids are not getting the quality of education that they might otherwise get. In all of these things, if possible, we try to compare to other places. The graph is constructed to show not only the relatively declining rate of TC, but relatively to more experience in the rest of the state. Janine has new info. Suzanne asked about getting this info from the private schools. She can provide it to early childhood education and compare it WY wide. She asked what kind of retention tools are used- housing, childcare. As you compare to WY, there are communities that provide different things. Janine said that they try to have a competitive benefits package (but no housing). Health insurance- TC is a leader in providing this to their employees. The new subsidy from the state is going to replenish the million dollar subsidy from their operating budget. Suzanne noted that the Journeys School provides housing. This may not be important over one year, but over time it may. Jonathan said all of this has to be placed in the context of housing costs. Salaries are another important point.

Jonathan said that the JH Almanac also has socio-economic stuff if you want to make some of these calculations. Suzanne has a closing interview for leaving staff, where she asks if housing, benefits, salaries a factor in their decision to leave.

Janine said that you could put a lot of this in the appendix. Lori likes seeing the years of experience of the teachers. It is not necessarily a bad thing to have an experienced teacher replaced by another experienced teacher. Replacing someone with 15 years of experience with someone with 1-2 years, though, is another story. Janine said that they have a more detailed chart. There is a 5-7 year window when retention is the weakest.

Jonathan said that if you can provide data ahead of time to Lydia that would be great so everyone can take a look at it before the meeting. Also, he asked that everyone review the minutes as well.

Suzanne asked about student ratios. Jonathan asked how important they are. Janine thinks that a student ratio is different from classroom size. Special education would pollute the student ratio number. They have classroom size. Suzanne thinks that classroom size is better. In terms of the public investments- classroom size, tenure- people can make their own judgments. Jonathan thought that ultimately we can get some student-teacher ratios; the larger question is whether simply knowing a student ratio or classroom size tells you anything you want to know. You can gather information on a lot of stuff, but just because you know it does it tell you anything? The group last year decided that whereas test scores might not tell you a ton of stuff, classroom size didn’t make it because it wasn’t necessarily indicative of the education being provided. Suzanne said that it is the perceived quality- lower size = better education.

Regarding continuing education: we have info from TSS, and CWC. Those were the two measurements we could get for continuing education. The two questions are: are these things good to know? If so, are the data updateable? Are there things missing- adult, nontraditional education?

Suzanne asked about GED classes. Janine asked about TSS participation. They have sent 5th-6th-7th graders in there. Are these numbers included? Jonathan thinks that they are. Steve has data on library programs- including computer classes. They have a lot of Spanish classes, with long waiting lists. Jonathan asked about inquiries at the reference desk. This is a piece of education. Steve said that they record many interactions, but many are very trivial- such as where is the phone book? They can provide info, but some of it is meaningless.

Janine asked how you take an emerging demographic trend that cuts across the 12 groups, and not lose the enormity of the task because it’s divided into 12 groups. Jonathan said that there is no good answer. To give you an idea of the internal debate we had going on last year, it’s like the concept of the sustainability. Every one of the 12 groups has a sustainability component. You can cut it a whole bunch of different ways. We set up a separate resource sustainability group because it was too hard to identify that one component, if for no other reason that other organizations were not oriented in this fashion. The Latino issue has human services and education components. He is hoping the same things will bubble up in groups. When we look at next steps, hopefully we can identify these themes. A couple of groups can work on this together. In the conference itself, it’s going to be incumbent on the speaker to touch on these themes.

We did percentage of adults with college degrees because this informs a lot of pressures/demands/ standards that the community is setting. We went from 30 to 46% college graduates over 10 years, suggesting an extraordinary change in the community demographic. Jonathan got this data from the census. Eric was wondering about working adults with college degrees. Suzanne said that the town just did a survey with this information. Steve thought that they could provide the cross reference between age and college education.

Jonathan said that having a high proportion of our community with a college degree or better underlies pressures on educators.

Steve mentioned distance education. They support this with the adult study center and focus groups. He doesn’t know how many people are participating in this. He is thinking about people getting master’s elsewhere (teachers, Prescott College). It’s a difficult statistic to measure but it would show a lot for the community. Lori pointed out not just degrees but number of people taking courses is also interesting. Janine has numbers for online learning. Jonathan thinks this a good indicator.

Janine noted that there is a lack of institutions here, and people are mitigating with online learning.

There are three homework assignments. First, please review the minutes. Second, for those of you with data, please collate it and shoot it to Lydia. The third thing is to think about the statement of ideal- where do we want to be? What are the qualities that we want to pass on to future generations? The statement of ideal was trying to reflect the broadly defined sense of education here. Consider whether you think the statement reflects a statement of JH in an ideal future. Statements of ideal differ from vision statements in that they avoid terms like excellence or quality- things that can’t be measured. If you can’t measure it, you can’t assess it. Every component is something that can be unambiguously measured. Does this statement capture the qualities we feel are important to pass on? At the next meeting, we will talk about indicators we have looked at, and ask whether the indicators tell us whether we are moving towards ideal.