Dear Steller Community, a proposal is on the table to amend the Steller Community Bylaws (attached HERE). These changes are being proposed for your consideration. With just over a week to consider the attached changes, we will present these amended Bylaws for a VOTE at the upcoming All Community Meeting on April 21^st; the meeting will start at 6:30 pm.

An overview of the concept for the proposed changes is as follows:

Background

Steller’s governance has grown up with five parts. Students have Op Group. Parents have Parent Group. Teachers have Staff Meetings. The principal has final responsibility to the School District. And Ad Board is supposed to coordinate the other four groups.

Ad Board is designed to be a kind of representative body, like Congress. But unless members attend the other meetings, that process doesn’t work. In actual practice, Ad Board usually doesn’t have much to do. The vast majority of decisions are made by the other groups without going to Ad Board. However, we spend a lot of volunteer time on having Ad Board, and that wastes time that could be spent on more productive and fun parts of Steller. In addition, evening meetings of Ad Board are difficult for students to attend and often have inconsistent representation.

Idea

This concept is to change Steller bylaws to get rid of Ad Board. Instead of Ad Board, we would develop new bylaws along the following principles:

1. Students should make as many decisions as possible without interference. This is part of the philosophy of our school.

2. As we do now, decisions appropriate to each group would go to that group.

3. When a decision affects more than one group or the entire school, we should work together to work on those issues by the following means:

a. For small issues, the three groups (students, parents and staff) form a committee to work through the issue by consensus and bring back their results to the three groups;

b. For large issues, Steller holds more frequent all-community meetings to reach decisions, running them like town hall meetings in which everyone present gets to speak and vote.

Another change to the bylaws was recently proposed and is represented in the attached DRAFT. This change is forwarded in order to strengthen the Op Group by widening the membership requirements.

These items are SEPARATE in nature and will be voted on separately.

In addition to the changes to the Bylaws the All Community Meeting will be a chance to celebrate the great number of accomplishments achieved during the 2015-2016 school year. Please plan on attending. If you have any questions please contact Karen Gillis (907-887-1148 or karenlgillis@me.com).