Hillcrest High School Community Council Meeting

8 September 2021

Present:

Steve Brown, Stacey Timmerman, Karina Park, Suzanne Riches, Jan Hansen, Brant Thomsen, Greg Leavitt, Juan Perez, Amir Zaidi, Rebecca Martin, Stacey Kratz

Absent:

R.J. Graham, Jeremy Wright, Nikki Huff, John Olsen

Guests:
None

Elections:

Elections were held for the Hillcrest SCC leadership for 2021-2022.  All positions were voted for unanimously, with no abstentions.

Chair: Brant Thomsen

Vice Chair: Karina Park

Secretary: Stacey Kratz

Construction report from Mr. Leavitt:

The moving-in has been rough in some ways, but the students seem happy overall and the teachers are as well. We are interested to hear your thoughts; we know the kids don’t like the stairs, but they’re handling it! We’re going to leave the elevator open to everyone for now.

We are making great progress on the area to the west of the school; within a month we are going to have our south (Husky Drive) entrance open. We opened up the west (7th East) entrance and hope students are using that. (Currently three entrances open; two off 900 East and the one off 700 East to the back parking lot.) On the west side we’ll have almost 300 feet of drop-off space; we don’t think parents will be jammed together; two entrances, one off 7th and one of Husky Drive and the one off 9th. We’ll have about 900 parking spots in the new west lot. Also, a planned roundabout will connect Husky Drive and 700 East so we will have no left turns.

The auditorium will be done in October; it’s the last big piece to get finished. Airflow is improving; the kids haven’t been complaining much but the teachers have noticed it. Students have discovered ALL the stairs so they’re using all of them rather than crowding into one or two.

Regarding school lunch, our kitchen hood didn’t pass fire code so they had to fix that and are waiting for the fire marshal to come back. The kids are really excited to have the hot food back.

Moving the food serving into the kitchens will free up space for more tables. There are outdoor tables by the gym that they can sit on, and we’re buying more for outside near the main office. We’re open to feedback if the kids don’t feel like they have enough space. At this point we have not put out all of our tables yet; when we start using the lunch lines we’ll be able to put up more tables. They can sit anywhere on the first floor to eat.

COVID-19 update:

About 40% of students out of 2,200 are wearing masks. Half of teachers are wearing masks. Hillcrest has masks at the front desks if anyone wants one; right now they’re following CDC rules and those from the Governor and legislature.

The school has around 8-12 students who’ve gotten COVID; if they get to 15 they will need to stop doing assemblies and large gatherings; if it gets up to 45 they will start to “test to stay.” Mr. Leavitt think they will be fine; Hillcrest last year was at the bottom end of the schools in COVID rates.

TSSP and LAND Trust plans

Brant:

Current plans are posted on the Hillcrest website; go back and look and see what we did last year, to use as our starting point this year. This is a nice bit of money we get from the state that we can choose to use to help students and focus on areas where the district and the school might not be able to help as much.

Mr. Leavitt:

We just received our survey data back and it really is headed in the right direction:  staying focused on rigor, relevance, relationships, and hiring enough teachers to cover our classes. We have an 87% graduation rate; it’s the highest Hillcrest has ever had. Our goal is to get to 90% and compete with Brighton’s and the Corner Canyon’s, even with the unique challenges we have with refugees and immigrant students. Our progress the past four years are 77%, 83%, 84%, 87%. Of course, we don’t know what COVID will do; we work really hard to get all of our seniors through and we’ll just have to see what COVID does for that. In 2018 we had 88 dropouts; in the past year we only had 62.

Parent and teacher comments really indicated the school is going in a positive direction; we will go over that data at an upcoming SCC meeting. Hillcrest High School is one of eight high schools in the state of Utah awarded School of Excellence by Superintendent Dickson. That’s just really key because there was some strict criteria for that, including making enough growth with our ELL and other students across the board. It was significant enough we were named one of eight Schools of Excellence in the state. (Awarded in May)

Our TSSP is $370,000 and our LAND Trust is $270,000 for this year.

Steve Brown:

With our plan this year do we have a mechanism for additional funding if we have issues with getting all our spending done in the approved areas?

Mr. Leavitt:

We spend most of our money on staff, so if we have more money, we just spend on staff, because we always need more staff. We don’t need technology. We have what we need.

Brant:

We’re open to suggestions for a “Plan B” and what we can do if we aren’t able to spend enough of our allocation as planned. April 20 is the final deadline; we’d like to get it finished by March, with April as a backup if we need to take more time.

SCC Training

Three people have done the training so far; the rest have plans to do it on the remaining times: Sept. 9 at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. and Sept. 14 at 10 a.m. You can also go through the SCC basics online to get a refresher.

Parent-Teacher Conferences

Question:

Do we want Zoom or in-person, or a combination of both?

We don’t know which one parents will come more for.

Rebecca Martin:

A lot of ninth-grade parents like to come meet the teachers and see the building.

Consensus: A mixed conference would be best; It might be best to do the Zoom day on the second day, because that’s the day that overlaps with middle school conferences.  Greg Leavitt said he would go forward with having in-person meetings on Monday, September 20 and Zoom meetings on Tuesday, September 21.

Agree on a meeting time and day:

Currently our monthly meetings are scheduled at 5 p.m. on the second Wednesday of each month.

Second Wednesday of October is the start of UEA weekend; so, we agreed to hold our meeting next month on the third Wednesday; Stacey Kratz motioned and Rebecca Martin seconded doing third Wednesday in October and then back to the usual schedule for the rest of the year.  Motion was voted for unanimously, with no abstentions.