Here’s Wilmington Apple’s Question of the Day for September 12: Wilmington Superintendent of Schools Mary DeLai is launching a new District Advisory Council in an effort to “enhance communication and collaboration with families and community partners.” DeLai is looking for volunteers to join the council. Will you step up to serve?
Learn more about the opportunity below, taken Superintendent DeLai’s latest blog post:
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One of my goals this year as Superintendent of Wilmington Public Schools is to enhance communication and collaboration with families and community partners. To that end, I will be forming a new District Advisory Council comprised of parents, staff, and community members. The purpose of the District Advisory Council (DAC) will be to bring about continuing improvement in the programs of the district’s schools and to provide an effective means of two-way communication between the Superintendent and stakeholder groups on a variety of important topics raised by the Superintendent and by DAC members.
The DAC is intended to provide a forum for sharing ideas, successes and concerns between schools, families, and other non-school groups and to bring new ideas back to each respective school community. Specifically, the role of District Advisory Council members will be to:
- Advise the Superintendent on issues that the district is facing and discuss possible solutions to challenges,
- Assess programs or problem areas of district-wide importance and make reports and recommendations to the Superintendent as appropriate,
- Be informed about the background, rationale, and decision-making processes made by the district throughout the year as issues arise,
- Communicate issues and concerns raised by various stakeholders as represented by DAC members,
- Explore and identify methods of greater involvement of the entire community in the educational process,
- Share the District’s vision and mission with a variety of representative groups, and
- Accurately represent the whole constituency.
The District Advisory Council is intended to include broad representation of the population served by our schools. We seek to include the following representatives:
- One parent from each school in the district selected by each school’s site council
- One member of the Special Education Parent Advisory Council, selected by SEPAC members
- One staff volunteer from each grade level (early childhood, primary, intermediate, middle, and high school)
- One Wilmington Teacher’s Association representative
- One Principal representative
- One District-level administrator
- One Wilmington High School student
- One representative of the Wilmington Education Foundation, selected by WEF
- One representative of the Wilmington School Business Partnership, selected by WSBP
- One representative of the Wilmington Chamber of Commerce, selected by the WCoC
- One community member at large, selected by the Wilmington School Committee
- One School Committee Liaison, selected by the Chair of the Committee
- Superintendent of Schools (Chair)
We anticipate that the DAC will meet on a quarterly basis with the first meeting to occur in October. If you are interested in volunteering to serve on this group, please send a letter of interest to me at mary.delai@wpsk12.com or mail to Wilmington Public Schools, 161 Church Street, Wilmington, MA 01887. Please be sure to include which school or group you are volunteering to represent. For those parents seeking to represent a specific school, contact the chair of your School Advisory Council requesting a nomination to that seat on behalf of the Council. If you have questions, please feel free to email me directly.
I look forward to working more closely with our parents, staff, and community partners.
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