The Observation Deck

Hey Jim!

Yanno..... if there were a place for the 'average Joe(sephine)' to post annoucements/news/information about schools it would be really cool! I tried to post these informational tidbits (that affect everyone in t he community but are only reported to parents) in the 'School annoucements' area - but was denied. So.. here is another bit of information for parents and non-parents alike:

The Lakewood City Schools will be hosting a COMMUNITY FORUM on Middle School Student Conduct and School Climate. The community is invited to join in this discussion which will be centered around evaluating the applicability of the recomendations made by the HighSchool Climate Commitee to the middle schools.

During the meeting on Tuesday, February 21, 2006 (in the East Cafeteria of Lakewood HIgh School - 7:00 - 8:30 PM) the commitee will report on the work that has been done and will seek community feedback in preparation for making recommendatons to the Ssuperintendent in April.

Peace,
~Charyn

Charyn-

We try to put all info like you have posted on the events calendar on the front page of the Observer.

At least two of the items have been added, but we don't have more complete information about the vaccinations yet.

For all the traffic we get on the Deck, there are more views of the front page. There are a lot of people who get to the Deck through that (and some people who read the front page never venture onto the Deck), so the feeling was that the calendar there would have more visibility.

Hi DL!

I understand and completely agree that the front page is the primary landing page and required the first attention in terms of posting events. My suggestion was based upon my hope that I would also be able to post things of interest in their appropriate spot here on the Deck so that:

1) People that come straight to the deck could find the information quickly - sorted by subject area

2) Agenda items that are ripe for discussion could be tossed around prior to the event date (having school discussion in a 'school' section was an outgrowth of this).

3) To generate chatter about otherwise 'static' calendar items that are upcoming that would provide people a 'non-tax' way of supporting education in Lakewood.

My apologies if my post sounded as if there was 'no' visibility to events - that was not my intent!

Peace,
~Charyn

(I see that the Deck is not auto-spell checking my posts anymore... my apologies in advance to all )

Charyn-

One reason we have "non discussion" areas for the schools & council is to give those entities an uncluttered space to post information. We didn't want their messages to be diluted or difficult to find. We also want to respect the messenger.

When we set up the Deck, we thought that if anybody wanted to discuss anything going on in the schools or in council (etc.) they were welcome to do it in the discussion areas.

I appreciate that you want to post calendar-type information (Jim regularly does this). Recently, Dan implement the option to see a list of upcoming events. Before, you had to click on the calendar date to see if there were any events (which wasn't optimal). When I ask people to post to the calendar, I want to make sure that all bases are covered.

We attempt to make things easy and accessible. There is rarely a clear path to this end, so your point about people who only visit the Deck is well taken.

There's no "rule" about this kind of thing - we're trying to figure it out as we go along because among other things, we don't really have a model (that fits) to pattern ourselves after.