Meeting Jan. 30th 2012

The main topic of discussion was the CPA conference coming up in Sacramento in Feb. Arrangements were made as to where we will meet and when we will leave. There will be 2 vans leaving, one will leave from Palmdale here at the school at 10:00 on Sunday the 12th. Another Van will be leaving from Lancaster, please contact Stockdale for that information. We need to meet the CPA members about the Clean Tech Academy grant from 5-7 PM in the Falor Room at the Sheraton Grand Hotel.

We talked about the need to get room 250 ready for the following:

Stockdale has been coordinating with test pilots from Edwards who are establishing a high school cooperative program for students to train with them virtually as pilots. The Society of Experimental Test Pilots (SETP) will provide us with software, yokes, pedals, mentors, and technical support for our students to "game" with actual test pilots through virtual connections to learn how to fly. As a carrot for the participating students they will sponsor our top 6-8 students to attend the SETP symposium in September at the Grand California Hotel (Disneyland) for 3 days (usually costs $600 per person). Expectations for us would be selecting appropriate interested students (plenty in the academy I'm sure), providing a participating teacher (also covered by academy), using site computers, and the potential sticking point- having our IT work with their technical person to allow the virtual connection with their mentor/pilots through the network/firewall.

This opportunity is really a special one as only select schools throughout the country were invited to participate and it really is complimentary that we were selected. This partnership could also lead to potentially other opportunities in the future as well. 

Mr. Stockdale will be putting on a BBQ for the academy students to reward them for good grades. Many of the Academy teachers are contributing food to this event, as well. After the students are done eating they can come play games in Mrs. Garmon's room, 250 for $1:00. The game day will be every Wednesday and it helps us raise money for the graduation stoles for our first graduation class.

We discussed student of the month for January and the results will be posted on Wednesday at the Digital Design and Engineering Academy website created by Sarah: http://ddeacademy.weebly.com/ Please make sure you check it out and congratulate the students. Many prizes were donated by the teachers as a reward to the students.

Great News

One of our Academy Students, Bianca Bequer, received the AV Press Future Leader 2012 award. This will be in the newspaper.

Meeting Jan. 23 2012

We talked mostly about the schedule for next years' classes and how many we thought we would have next year. Stockdale needs to submit our projections to Administration. We also, talked about how important with the new grant it is to have pure classes.

A new Academy Website

Miss Sarah Allen has created a new Academy Website. Please check it out
http://ddeacademy.weebly.com/index.html

Meeting Monday Jan. 9th 2012

• Teachers meet during lunch and after school due to the amount of information needed to be covered:
• Funding was cut by 20% this year, $16,000 by the state. Ways to cover the loss were discussed. Many teachers offered to forgo their supplemental funds to help cover loss.
•  An Update was given by James Stockdale on the NASA collaboration
• Teachers were asked to help pass out application to allow new students to join the Academy at semester.
• Teachers were all ask to do at least one weekly event to provide fun activeness for our students in the Academy. Some ideas were thrown around such as breakfast, BBQ's, more movie nights, etc. It was suggested that these activities need to be published in the Academy calendar and maybe visual handouts as a carrot for students to stay in the Academy.
• A sign up lists for the following upcoming events was discussed:

Engineering recruiting/interest competition (pine wood derby)
NASA project development
Freshmen recruiting (8th grade visits)
Student of the month
SETP test pilot competition (Disneyland in Sept)
Northrop competition
Lego Team
Retreat Planning
Museum trip (Kramer comments)
Aerospace trip
Solar trip
Knotts
Internships (magic, Northrop, Lockheed, NASA, afrl, new options)

• APEX- who on board for interventions: an option for our students and our teachers can administrate.
• Teachers discussed probation students. A decision on who would have to be removed from the Academy and who showed effort on their correction plan and would need further assistance was laid out. Also, the follow up administration of these decisions was clarified.

A Teaching Moment

Mrs. Hammer reports that 4th period had the highest scores for geometry at KHS and 5th period had the 3rd highest for KHS on the benchmarks. Great job you guys.