HiCap Parents Council: March 2025

HiCap Parents Council

March Meeting

Virtual Meeting

03/05/2025 - 10 AM - 12 PM

In Person Attendance: Liz P, Amity, Angie, Ashley, Jen C, Mairead, Holly, Terri, Terra

In Person Late: None

Zoom Meeting Attendance: Carson, Sean, Faustine, Veronica, Hong, Aishwarya

Zoom Late: Elisa, Imen, Josh H(?)

Secretary: Liz P.

Zoom Liaison: Mairead

Next meeting date: Tuesday, April 1, 2025

Discussion:

Still a lot of concern across multiple schools about the effectiveness of differentiation within an integrated classroom. Many classrooms are not differentiating at all, so HiCap-qualified students are not receiving an accelerated or challenging ELA program.
Moorlands is doing a walk-to reading during their ELA block, and it is currently effective due to:

Partnering: Moorlands staff are partnering (two teachers partnering together)
Unified approach: Staff using a “structured literacy process” — a standardized method of teaching reading levels, phonics, etc. — in order to be more cohesive; partnered staff wanted to be in agreement as students move back and forth between their classrooms
Related: No East Ridge rep on the Council this year to report how their walk-to ELA model is going

“One of my big pushes this year was to have elementary students have 60 minutes of math per day.” - Amity. This means less time for other subjects.
Fear: That if HiCap students are not getting enough support (worksheets as the only thing they get, for example), they will not be ready for the higher levels.
Discussion about reluctant writers; many hicap students are happier to read a high level text, but they are missing the depth of discussion and also the output piece from writing.

Districts can’t have more than 16% of their population qualifying for a special education

Bill 5192 is trying to increase the special education multiplier; getting this pushed would help us meet the budget gap. Holly says this one is probably most important to push.

Amplify message of PTAs. Ask constituents to weigh in with their reps. Take a position.

Families should now know if their students are HiCap qualified.
For schools that don’t have a walk to math, can single qualified math kids now bus to other schools?

Amity is willing to make an offer to those families (since the dual qualified kids are already being bused).

There are fewer 1st graders that are qualified in math this year. This is expected since there is a new exam that is difficult to study for. So now there are more single-qualified ELA kids as compared to past years.
Good feedback from school community about the 5th grade math information and communication.

Council Questions/Updates

North Creek is discouraging all kids from acceleration, particularly taking a lot of APs. They suggest no more than 10 college classes over the course of HS.

WHS: When 8th graders are moving up, they are similarly discouraged.
Are there repercussions for North Creek kids who sign up for more? Not known.
What do college counselors say? We need them to weigh in.
What about prerequisites? Amity reports that prereqs have generally been eliminated as of two years ago. This was done because it seemed some segments of students were not in the higher courses (equity/bias issues).
Do we need to eventually create a document about AP pathways for HiCap? Too late for this year, but for the future.

Should there be a change to the way we do our elementary reps now that there are no more EAP classrooms? Yes.

School Board is hiring a Hiring Firm
They will then reach out to community for feedback (we will reach out to community to provide feedback)
They want to hire someone before the end of June

Action Items

Amity: Will talk to Andrea about helping Ashley and others to look at curriculum/ELA material.
Middle School (& High School Reps): Reach out to Elizabeth Rampson with ELA concerns and what can be done at/suggestions for MS level. Elizabeth is on HiCap Council and Middle School HiCap Task Force.
RE: Budget: ALL Reps: ASAP, please review letter regarding the state budget sent by Terra on 3/5. Then HiCap reps should decide what we want to go into our own communication to constituents and share with Mairead.

Letter/Social post - DUE March 17: Mairead will do draft (PLEASE SEND INPUT); Ashley will do MailChimp. Holly will review draft. Letter will include: how it affects our kids (generally and with personal story) and template for people to use when contact state reps.

Terra: Create and submit rule change so that all elementary schools will have a rep (and eliminate feeder pattern elementary reps).
Terra: Find out if HiCap can participate in Family Symposium on April 24
ALL reps: We need someone to shadow election. Please reach out to Holly. If you have not done a job this year, this is a good and important one!
ALL reps: You need to decide by April 1 if you will be running for your position again. Please reach out to Holly.
Faustine: Will sign us up for Menchies and MOD evenings and report back dates so we can spread the word in our communities.
Mairead and Liz: Get speaking/community event going. Liz will connect to Austina and help with messaging. Mairead will help with location, EventBrite.
Regarding Superintendent Hiring: Holly will proactively tell us the dates of things happening. Ashley will work on first draft of position statement

Next month Agenda/Meeting

HiCap Parents Council