Athletic Handbook Committee
Posted by mevingham on September 30, 2009
Our Athletic Handbook Committee met for the first time last night. This committee is made up of 14 people representing various stakeholders in our community and district – administrators, parents, representatives from the sports boosters, community members, coaches, athletic managers and support staff. It is being facilitated by the High School Principal, High School Assistant Principal and me.
Our mission is to review and update our handbook which has not been reviewed for many years. Task #1: Each person received a copy of the Alden Handbook and one other handbook from an area school. (Thanks to all the schools who were willing to share their work.) The purpose of reviewing other handbooks is twofold. One – we want to see what other schools are doing and tap into their good ideas. Two – we want to make sure that if there are pitfalls in other handbooks, that we avoid them. That is how we learn. We don’t know what we don’t know. By reviewing other work and ideas, it will only help us to learn and grow as a committee.
Because we are splitting the work, it makes the work more tolerable because as you know this is work that has to be done on our time in the midst of family time, our regular jobs and other items that fill our days. We are in groups of 2-3 people all whom have the same task. My group is reading a handbook from a neighboring district, and we become experts in that handbook knowing it in and out, so when working on Alden’s Handbook, we can pull ideas from our “homework” and reference it when working as a group. Other groups have different handbooks and will do the same.
Next time we will meet in small groups and discuss what we see are strengths and areas in need of improvement in each handbook and then come together to look for patterns and trends. This will help us set the priorities for our revision work.
Thanks to our community members. I am so proud of the group already, and I can tell that we will make some great gains! They were there and committed and ready to work. Again, the community steps up to benefit our school. Wonderful!!
