Dean Helton
School Board Meeting Reaction Paper
YOUT 350
Professor Nix
I have been a substitute teacher for a local private school here in Memphis for the past
two years. Macon Road Baptist School is a small Christian based school of around 400 students
from Pre-K up to seniors in high school. So when it came to this assignment I had no problem
with asking if I could be a part of a weekly administrative meeting, as they would call it. Much
like myself, the headmaster, who led the meeting, does not see the point of having a meeting if it
is just to have a meeting. Needless to say there was a lot of information shared and discussed
throughout its entirety.
I have never attended a board meeting before, and so I had no idea what to expect. At the
beginning of the meeting the headmaster opened with a word of prayer and then an agenda was
passed to each person attending. I would have to note that the agenda was followed very strictly
due to the short time period that was permissible for the meeting to happen. The meeting did not
only cover that week’s events but it also touched on events leading up to the end of the month.
With the school year coming to an end the main topic was graduation and the special
awards ceremony for the entire school. Because Macon Road is such a small school there are a
few things that they do that larger schools would not. For example, the awards program goes on
during the school hours and is for the entire school. They hand out personal achievements that
each teacher assigns, as well as awards from the administrative staff and headmaster office.
“Ever since we started doing the award ceremony, our grade point average has increased
tremendously.” This is due to the fact that students view this ceremony as a goal that they each
want to reach. Each person in the meeting was given tasks to prepare for the ceremony as well as
graduation, and were assigned tasks for during both programs. They also discussed the positives
and negatives of the ceremonies and graduations of previous years. They had a folder full of
notes that they had taken in their past meetings. The floor was open at the end for anyone to
speak up about concerns or additions that they might seem fitting for the programs this year. It
was good to see how interactive each part of the meeting was. I was expecting it to be more of a
sit, listen, and obey type meeting. Not only did they discuss and vote on the awards that they
were going to give out for the entire year, but the headmaster also handed a few awards out to
some of the people attending the meeting. There was seven including myself and the headmaster
in the meeting.
After they had gone over the awards they jumped right into the goals and the purpose of
this particular meeting. Like I had stated, the school year was coming to an end and so another
hot topic was how they can be helping the faculty and staff begin to close down their areas and
classrooms without disrupting or distracting the students. I did not realize, but there is quite a bit
of stuff that has to be done before the school faculty can call it summer break. With only two
weeks left of actual class and a week of finals the leadership needed to help the faculty and staff
clear out their rooms, pack up all curriculum, put in final grades, do evaluations of their
classroom for the year, and begin to prepare for the following school year. At Macon Road the
Headmaster and leadership staff have an extra week of work once everyone has lefts for the
summer. This gives them the opportunity to assist the teachers and other staff any way they can.
They also take that time during that extra week of work to have an evaluation meeting of the
entire year, ranging from staff members, curriculums, meals, athletics, coaches, after school
clubs, etc. The evaluation meeting will be more of a detailed meeting of things that have already
been discussed as well as things that have not been touched on yet. And just like the first section
of the meeting, after the Headmaster had finished his spill, the floor was open for discussion.
The last thirty minutes of the meeting was called the planning and nurturing sections of
the meeting. Normally they would only plan or at least talk about things up to the end of
whatever month they were in, but because of the end of the year case, they talked about the entire
summer. At first I was caught off guard when they started talking about the summer. I guess I just
assumed that school staff got the summer off as well. That is not the case. They wrote out the
schedule for all of the summer sports events that would be taking place at the school, football
workouts, summer baseball, basketball work outs, etc., and they assigned shifts for the entire
summer to all seven of the staff members. The way they do it is due to the fact that a leadership
team member has to be at the school during any activities they break up each shift by weeks. As
they all planned out their summers there were a few incidents that were worked out to where a
week was split due to family vacations and other personal needs.
Along with monitoring activities that went on throughout the summer, there is quite a bit
of stuff that goes on and needs to be done to prepare for the next school year. There is always
renovating going on, lesson plans and curriculums have to be made, athletic programs have to be
planned, and probably the most important thing that I think they do is a prayer walk day. They
schedule a time closer to the end of the summer break and the entire leadership teams comes
together and prays over the school. In the past it has just been the leadership team, but they
discussed opening it up to ay faculty and staff. This is something that you would not see in most
public schools, and sadly is not done in many private Christian schools ether. It shows the heart
of the leadership team and staff at Macon Road.
They close with the nurturing section of the meeting. A different staffer shares an
encouraging story that has come across his path since the last time they had meet. The situation
that was shared when I was there was about a sophomore girl who had been struggling with
depression the entire school year. After their chapel service the week before she approach one of
the teachers and admitted that she was tired of being depressed and knew that Jesus was the only
way to have true joy. She was from a godly family, but let opinions of others direct her emotions.
It was encouraging to hear how these teachers cared so much about the students that they
interacted with throughout the entire year. After the time of sharing the person would close with
a passage of scripture and a word of prayer.
Overall this meeting was very enjoyable for me. I felt the call to ministry my senior year
of high school but wrestled with it for many years. In the past four years I have followed my
heart and felt that the Lord was guiding me to work with youth, but it was not until within the
past few months, even though I have been subbing and coaching for over a year now, that I have
felt the Lord pushing me towards school ministry. My heart tells me to be intentional with the
youth and I think there is no better way to do that then to walk alongside them for 180 plus days
every year. A spiritual leader of mine once said to me, “I can maybe remember 3 of my Sunday
school teachers growing up, but I can name every single one of my coaches and school teachers
who played a role in my walk with the Lord.” This is my passion, and I truly believe that He
used this assignment to reassure my ministry calling.
