Submitted by Mary Jo Davis

Abha Wiersba and Katie Blackhall will be joining the steering committee. Stacey Foley is still interested but has been unable to attend meetings to date. Abha was able to be at the meeting on Oct 6.

We spent a few minutes going over the job assignments of the steering committee. They are currently:

Meeting Facilitator- Mary Jo Davis
Membership- Lisa Morrow
Webmaster-Joy Burns and Fang Dong
Operations-Carrie Berkley
Newsletter-Paula Muhs
MAGE liasion- Marilyn Chong
T&G Committee liasion- Paula Muhs
Publicity- Marilyn Chong
Programs- Barb Cey and Carrie Berkley

Mary Jo indicated that a potential new job would be helping with member recruitment. We have a list of previous members of PALs, T&G committee and other groupd that could be contacted about our new group. Other possible jobs for new steering committee members would be to take a job from someone who is doing 2 jobs. We also discussed starting some type of book group and we could use someone to spearhead that issue. If any of the new people are interested in these positions, please let Mary Jo know.

After some discussion we set our dates for the REACH meetings for the rest of the year. We decided to alternate between Tues and Thurs so that we don't lock out someone who already has a weekly committment to some other group. The dates are:

11/14- Heritage Libary Barb Cey speaking on state of Saline G&T affairs
1/18-Woodland Meadows Library
2/22-WM library
3/20-WM library
4/19-WM library

All meetings are at 7pm. Topics for the Jan-April meetings are TBD. We asked every steering committee member to bring to our next meeting in November a list of 3 topics that they would like to see covered at meetings this year. Carrie and Barb can then work to get a program going on the most popular topics. We will also ask parents at the Tracy Cross meeting to suggest topics. Mary Jo will have some type of list they can put their ideas on.

Everyone that can should bring 2 dozen cookies to the Tracy Cross evening presentation. Mary Jo and Marilyn are the only REACH members attending the teacher presentation. Mary Jo will bring nametags to help identify the REACH members as well as the G&T district committee members. We decided to have ice water only along with the cookies to simplify things. As of our meeting there were about 35 teachers and 30 parents attending. As of today that number has grown to 50 at each presentation.

Marilyn summarized the publicity. There was an article in the Saline Reporter and something will be in the Ann Arbor News (it actually came out yesterday.) She will make a flyer listing the REACH goals and our next meeting time to be available at the Tracy Cross presentation.

Barb has ordered several copies of Tracy Cross's new book but they had not come in yet. We decided not to sell copies at the event but to have some piece of paper listing where books could be ordered. If the books come in they will be on display.

We set Thurs Oct 19 at 7pm in the WM library as a follow-up discussion night for anyone attending Dr. Cross presentations. This will be open to staff and parents. Barb is making up a flyer to hand out to all attendees inviting them to the discussion.

We then discussed whether our new group should be an official Michigan Alliance for Gifted Education affliate. We decided that at this time we needed to focus on getting our group started and that we should look at affliating in the spring. Maybe we could have a meeting devoted to that topic. We will make available the MAGE membership forms so that any individual can join. This way we do not have to collect dues of any type this first year. That was a big point in making this decision.

We put off discussions of future projects until our next meeting. We tentatively set our next steering committee meeting for Dec 12 (Tues) at 1pm. Many at the meeting mentioned sticking with morning times so this is open to discussion. We are looking at the first or second week of December. I also need input as to whether we want to pick a regular time for the steering committee meetings or whether we want to rotate times.

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