November Meeting

Minutes of the Parents’ Council Meeting of 6 November 2017

Grade	Type of Representative	Name	Present at meeting 6 November 2017
1a	Parent	Evgenia Lynum	x
	Deputy	Kyle Depew	x
1b	Parent	Gobind Singh Gill	x
	Deputy	Birute Stankuniene
2a	Parent	Thilanka Madugodage
	Deputy	Dmitry Ilinskiy
2b	Parent	Derya Ongen	x
	Deputy	Birendra Kumar
3a	Parent	Philmar Middelthon	x
	Deputy	---
3b	Parent	Thrasyvoulos Gryparis
	Deputy	Anastasia Solomonova (solomonova) Hole
4a	Parent	Kate Rushdy	x
	Deputy	Tara Tinholt
4b	Parent	Jennifer Fagan
	Head of PC	Anne Lise Kielland	x
	Deputy	Tessa Howell	x
5	Parent	Mette Reitz	x
	Deputy	Ragnhild Krøglid	x
6	Parent	Prashant Kanungo	x
	Deputy	Heidi Robertson
	Deputy	Frode Olsen
7	Parent	Robert Jones	x
	Deputy	Haseung Choi
8	Parent	Andrew Langridge	x
	Deputy	Elizabeth Olsen
9	Parent	Anne-Valérie Sickinghe	X (minutes secretary)
	Deputy	Mark Williams	x
	School Principal	Robert Browne (RB)	Present during pt. 1

1. General update from the Principal

Disco night: The Student Council (SC) would prefer involvement in arranging an end-of-year spring ball for grades 6 to 9 (around 80 students). From now on, Disco Night will be for grades 1 to 5 only.

Warm lunches: Students are happy enough with the quality, but improvement is needed on following points:

• School staff (especially Miss Chantale) is spending too much time distributing the lunches. The agreement was that skolematen.no would deliver at three delivery points, but so far lunches have been delivered in one single box. More delivery points have now been promised.
• The packaging contains too much single-use plastic. Students have now been encouraged to bring their own cutlery.

Yearbook: RB advises «if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it», and to be weary of student management unless students are given very specific parameters. Student pages with a collage could be a possibility. Jessica from SC has suggested a yearbook sub-committee. RB is very positive to the proposal of an own yearbook for Grade 10 next year.

Update on the school premises: Recently, RB has given two presentations to committees in Asker Kommune:

• Utvalg for oppvekst (Committee for Childhood and Adolescence)
• Formannskapet (Presidency)

In his presentations, he has emphasized AIS’s need for more space. AIS has 8,3 m2 per child in disposable surface, whereas the new Landøya Skole will have 23 m2. Therefore, the students from Risenga, that are suggested to be housed at the premises in Johan Drengsrudsvei while Risenga is being renovated, should be housed at the new Landøya school instead.

RB has proposed 2 different solutions for solving the need for more space following the growth of AIS in 2018-2019 and is still waiting for a reply. An answer was promised at the end of week 44, but had still not been received at the time of the PC meeting.

In his presentations, RB underscored the growing importance of AIS for the local community. The committee members have expressed surprise about how many of AIS’s students live in Asker. RB has denied to answer questions about how many AIS families are Norwegian, since this question is unfair: children of Norwegian parents can have grown up and gone to school abroad, and children born in Norway can have other home languages than Norwegian.

Winter concert: the school will rent Asker Konferansesenter for Wednesday 14th of December. This way, all the students will be on one site for the entire day. The conference center is large enough to house a large audience.

2. Utilization of income from PC-run events

Last year’s funds were allocated to the library by mistake, and will be re-allocated to the SFO.

For this year, Kyle Depew contacted Mr Andrew and received the following requests:

• A giant bin of equipment for students to use outside during breaks.
• New equipment for house events, to improve competitions and events.

It was suggested that the PC also ask Miss Anja for equipment requests. Mette Reitz will talk to Miss Anja and give us feedback at our next meeting.

To raise funds, it was proposed that the PC sell cake and coffee and charge an entrance fee during the winter concert. The specific purpose of the donations will be mentioned on Facebook and during all events from now on.

3. School sweatshirts

University.no has confirmed that they have received 30 orders. These will be delivered in week 45/46.

4. Evaluation of this year’s Halloween event

The event was a resounding success, and participants and parents found it very well-organized. 166 tickets were sold before the event. RB was also very happy about the volunteers.

It was proposed that a summary of how the event was organized should be written down and made available for next year’s organizers, e.g. on Google Docs. The absence of such a summary this year had made for a tricky start to the organization of the event.

We know that summaries have been written from previous arrangements, but they prove to be too hard to find on the website. Anne Lise will talk to RB about this.

5. The Winter Concert

Kate Rushdy is in charge, will need to start early. Raffle tickets bought by VIPPS should be registered, and tickets given to buyers straight away.

6. Other events

Philmar Middelthon (grade 3A+B parents) has a list of all the events where pictures will be taken for the yearbook. He also has a list of participants. Expected yearbook profit: NOK 30.000 if 220 yearbooks are sold. The book will be for sale when finished in the penultimate week of the school year. There is an ongoing discussion about preselling the yearbooks or not. This will be taken into consideration when we are closer in time.

7. Hot dog sale and Coffee Morning

This month’s Coffee Morning at Kaffebrenneriet was great, but it will be held in Asker library next time to facilitate conversation. There was initiative to organize this coffee morning twice a month instead of only once.

Kate Rushdy will send an email around ahead of the next hot dog sale.

8. Disco Night / prom / ball was included in 1.

9. was post-poned to our next meeting.

10. was included in 2.

The next PC meeting will be on December 4th at 15.40