November 8, 2005
Robin Gillespie, School Principal
Mark
Kenefick, Family Service Administrator
General
Beadle Elementary
Greta Chapman
.
Dear Rapid City Public Library
Board:
This letter is an official request by General Beadle
Elementary and the
What is a community school? Boiled down to the basics, a
community school is both a set of partnerships and a place where services,
supports and opportunities lead to improved student learning, stronger families
and healthier communities. A full service community school uses the school as a
community hub to support the learning of the children at the school, community
schools bring together many partners to offer a wide range of supports and
opportunities to children, youth, families and communities before, during and
after school.
The partnerships that we have already
committees from are the Discovery after School Program, Rapid City Health
Clinic and Juvenile Diversion. Black Hills Special Services operates our
Discovery program. Rapid City Health has a space designed in our new building
and they will be providing full primary health services (physician, dentists,
optometrist, and psychologist) to our students and families when the new school
opens. Juvenile Diversion is a division of the Department of Justices and
directly works with our truant students. They will be moving their offices into
our new building as well. We are negotiating with many other groups and
agencies, such as; Black Hills Community Theater and
Our
partnership with the Rapid City Public Library will consist of the following
general points with details yet to be negotiated:
·
·
The
Rapid City Public library will augment the General Beadle collection with
additional children’s, general collection and reference books. (This also could
include AV items, such as books on tape, videos and music plus periodical
materials)
·
·
The
joint collections will be available for General Beadle Staff, students and the
public to check out. Checkout will be accomplished by the use of both library
collection systems. General Beadle Staff and Public library staff will need to be
cross trained on each others systems.
·
The
Public library will assume the cost for staffing during the evening and weekend
hours. The Public library will also pay for the utilities it uses during its
operational hours.
·
Within
the next 30 days a detailed drawing of the General Beadle new media center will
be submitted to the public library for their review and input.
The
new
·
Design
will be completed by this January 2006 with construction bids going out in February
·
Construction
will start about mid April to beginning of May. Because the building is being
built at the same location of the current school construction will consist of
two phases.
o
Phase
one consists of the academic area, media center (library), and school offices and
will be completed by the first of December 2007 with students attending January
2008.
o
Phase
two consists of tearing down the old
·
The
Rapid City Public library could conceivably begin operations as soon as January
of 2008.
We
realize that this is the early stages of this possible partnership and many
details need to be negotiated and mutually agree upon. Clear communications and
flexibility is going to be needed by both organizations for this to be a
successful partnership. This is an exciting prospect for us at General Beadle.
This partnership will provide for our students and their families valuable
services and will greatly enhance our educational program. The staff at General
Beadle has a keen interest in making this a successful partnership.
Sincerely,
Robin
Gillespie, General Beadle Principal
Mark
Kenefick, Family Services Administrator