Community
Staff, students, and parents all help create and maintain a community that is reflective, adaptive, and renewing. All community members are learners. The school is governed by a teacher cooperative. This shared ownership and governance helps focus all stakeholders and fosters a spirit of commitment and dedication to making Avalon an ideal place to learn. Avalon encourages community-building processes such as circles and conflict resolution practices, giving voice to all participants.
Teacher Cooperative Governance Model
Avalon continues to use a teacher co-op governance model. We have utilized a teacher co-op since Avalon began, but we have fine-tuned the system over the seven years we have been in operation. There are two important components of this model. One is that all people on the teaching staff have equal authority in all decision-making situations. No one person, or group of persons, can make a decision without the consensus of the entire staff. While this is sometimes difficult and time consuming, it does give all staff a feeling of empowerment which translates into a great amount of ownership for our program. The second component is that all teaching staff members assume administrative duties. By the beginning of 2005, we had pulled two teachers out of ‘advisories’ in order to fill the roles of Business Manager and Program Coordinator. Since 2006-07, two teachers have job-shared the Program Coordinator position. These teachers increased the percentage of their time spent on administrative duties and decreased the percentage of time spent with students but had no increase in authority or decision-making power.