Alternative Education Resource Organization

School Starting

Publicly Funded Democratic Schools: Windsor House & ALPHA
Meghan Carrico & Deb O'Rourke

Windsor House School
Windsor House School has been publicly funded for 35 years but recently (the last five years) has had to fit into ministry educational guidelines that require individual assessment of each student’s learning. We have come up with some creative and not so creative ways to comply with these requirements. Whether we are still a democratic school is up for debate, but we continue to have a school meeting govern many aspects of the the school. The workshop will be a presentation of where we are as a school in regards to how we maintain our public funding and whether the community still considers itself democratically governed. This will cover how we work with liability and safety concerns, assessment, reporting, certified teaching staff, unions, parent, student, and staff involvement in the decision making in the school, as well as school district policies and how we work within them or modify them.

ALPHA Alternative School
Democratic public schools are rare, but in Canada ALPHA Alternative school has existed since 1972 with a mandate of community self-governance, student self-regulation and cooperative, non-judgmental learning. This workshop will address some of the issues of operating a democratic community school within a public education system.

Marketing and Fundraising 101
Moya Khabele
We will discuss the interconnectedness between marketing and fundraising and some practical tools to integrate the two to form a cohesive growth plan. The strategies of online marketing, direct mail, newsletters, press releases, special events, annual fund management, and cultivating a donor and networking database will be covered.

North Star: Start-up, Organizational Development, and Suggestions for Replication
Kenneth Danford
North Star is a unique program. How did we get started? What has changed from the original vision? What are the implications of being a center, not a school? How can we support others to create their own versions of North Star in their communities?

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