School Board Candidate Questionnaire

All -- GEPA plans to collect questions from the community, sort and organize them, and send them to every school board candidate. Ideally, we are looking to send 25-50 questions pertinent to the school board, school administration, and school system budget. We plan to post the candidates responses for the community to review.

We would like to have everyone's submissions by Sunday 9/25, so that we can prepare them and send to the candidates by Friday 9/30. We will post the candidate replies as soon as we receive them.

Please post your questions into this forum topic. If you have problems or issues doing so, please email your question(s) to me at marcmaier@earthlink.net and I will be happy to add them on your behalf.

We are using the forums for this as the easiest method to collect the display the questions. Trying to collect them over email could result in a few hundred email messages and make it too easy to miss important questions, and too hard for everyone to see the questions already posted.



The link for the forum topic is:

forums.goochlandparents.com link

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Marc Maier -- GEPA Chair

School Board Meeting 9/13

All -

just a reminder that there is a school board meeting Tues. 9/13 at 7 PM at Goochland High School.

There are some items on the agenda which may have wide concern (I will review the packet tomorrow from work where I have better bandwidth - the full packet takes about an hour to load from my home connection):
G. Approval of 2012-2013 Budget Calendar
C. School Improvement Plan: Goochland High School
D. School Improvement Plan: Goochland Middle School
E. Activity Fund Audit
G. Comprehensive Plan
H. August 2011 Financial Update

There will also be two public comment periods, towards the beginning and end of the meetings.



The full agenda and packet can be viewed here:
http://www.glnd.k12.va.us/index/schoolboard/agendas/


Marc Maier - GEPA Chairman

GEPA School Board Candidate Forums

With the input from Sandie Warwick, the GEPA board has decided to look at having a candidate forum for each district. However, instead of a debate-style event, we envision more of a open house style event, with the candidates having a table / area to meet with constituents from their district to answer questions and discuss school board issues.

To pull this off, we need to request volunteer help to organize the forums in Districts 1, 4, and 5. We also need someone to assist with the forum for District 3. We anticipate that they should run for approximately 2-3 hours. The place/time/date of the event will be up to the volunteers to work out with the candidates, preferably at a location convenient to that district.

The volunteers will be responsible for the following:

-- contact the candidates and schedule a time/date for the forum.
-- select and reserve a space convenient for the district for the date/time of the forum.
-- notify GEPA on location, date, and time info so that we can advertise the event.
-- manage the forum (mainly ensure the candidates get set up, and the forum starts/ends on schedule).

If we can not get enough volunteers to pull off a forum in each district, we may look at combining districts or going to a single forum for all districts.

If you are interesting in volunteering to run a forum in your district, please email me directly (marcmaier@earthlink.net) by Monday Sept. 12. Please do not reply to this message, as it will bounce to the entire email list. If you have any questions about volunteering, please email me directly and I'll reply as soon as I can. I plan to create and provide a basic check list to each volunteer to try and make sure that each district forum can run as smoothly and uniformly as possible.



Thanks,

Marc Maier -- GEPA Chairman

GCPS Now on Facebook & Twitter

via Penny Palen on the gcps-parents@googlegroups.com email list:

Parents,



The schools have finally joined the age of social media!  After last

week's earthquake and the delays with School Messenger, I suggested to

Asst. Superintendent Pete Gretz that they may want to consider an

additional venue of communication with parents, one with more "real

time" posting ability.  The accounts are now active and can be found

attached to a new website:



http://goochland.posterous.com/



Parents can access these accounts for school updates and emergency

information.



Please feel free to pass this information along to others!



Penny Palen