Piedmont’s Tri-School Site Council Gets an A+

At the start of the 2010 school year, the Piedmont Unified School District tried something different. It created a Tri-School Site Council to streamline decision-making among its three K-5 elementary schools.

“Our goal is to prepare the students from Wildwood, Havens and Beach Elementary Schools to arrive at middle school with consistent academic experiences,” says Wildwood Elementary Principal Carol Cramer. “We are a unified school system.”

The State of California requires that all public schools must have individual site councils, which are made up of principals, school staff and parents. Their purpose is to work on student achievement and, financing related to curriculum, as well as provide a forum for discussion. However, the state doesn’t mandate anything about coordination among schools within a district.

“Each school has a plan for student achievement, but some of it translates to tri-school,” says Havens Elementary Principal Teresa Susman. “It just made more sense to be talking to everybody at the same time -- for example, school-to-home communication and how can we enhance that. That wasn’t something we would do just at Havens, we could move that to other schools.”

Other issues that have been discussed this year during the tri-school meetings are science fairs, programs that are in all three schools such as physical education and bigger decisions like a staggered reading program for second graders.

“Any decisions that are related to the curriculum program, we are making on the Tri-School Site Council,” says Cramer.

Typically, site councils meet at least six times a year.

In Piedmont, for each meeting, the Tri-School Site Council convenes first, then people break into individual school groups. It’s still important for individual site councils to meet separately because there are matters that pertain to each school, the members say.

“Schools do have their individual site-specific issues,” says Wildwood Elementary Site Council parent representative Catherine Teare. For example, she says, each school has particular emergency plans and individualized goals for the . For Beach, there's the issue of while construciton goes on.

“The three schools have tri–school goals and then they have individual goals,” she says. “I think that there’s a good balance.”

All site council meetings are open to community members and are announced in weekly school bulletins one week before the meetings are held.