Activity: Attend a construction meeting for a school that is undergoing new construction.

Description: I attended a construction meeting on the construction site of our new

building. This is a bi-monthly meeting that takes place. All individuals who have a part
in the new building are invited to attend the meeting and I attended as principal designee.
In attendance on the day that I went were members of the construction crew and owners,
architect and his crew, amilton !ounty Department of "ducation grounds and building
department, the geothermal company, the fire marshal, and members of !D"
accounting department. The purpose of the meeting is to provide updates to the
committee and to make sure that everyone is on the same page and that all procedures are
being followed. #ltimately, the principal attends the meetings to be kept abreast of the
information and the progress, but most of the decisions have been predetermined and
there really isn$t much wiggle room since budgets have been predetermined.
%hat went well&
I think that it was really good to have school representation there. These people are on
our campus each and every day so we need to build some kind of relationship with them.
%hile they are not allowed to have any interaction with our teachers or students 'and this
was constantly reinforced( we still need to be respectful to one another and we still need
to understand each other$s needs and wants. It was great when )ary %aters, the assistant
superintendent of au*iliary services, said that this is a wonderful learning opportunity for
our students. In this day and age of +T", this truly is an awesome learning e*perience
for our students so I was absolutely thrilled to hear that ,r. %aters mentioned this
himself- e did say that we needed to be able to work out a way that certain workers
could come to talk to our staff or even to the students to inform them of the processes
taking place so that learning could occur from the situation that was taking place right
before their very eyes.
%hat did not&
The lingo was very hard to understand. I obviously do not speak construction and I know
understand how some of our students feel- I felt like I needed a dictionary in front of me
so that I could understand what was going on.
The other thing that did not go well was I did not know who everyone was. .riginally
Dr. +tewart was supposed to attend the meeting, but at the last minute he asked that I
attend because he was called to another meeting. I did not mind going and actually really
en/oyed it, but I was not sure who was who. This caused a little bit of a problem because
I felt like I couldn$t follow the conversations in their entirety.
)iven the chance to do it again, how would you do it better&
If I could go back and do it again I think I would ask more 0uestions before going in. I
would make sure I knew who would be present and who was responsible for each part of
the pro/ect. I think that by being aware of who was who this would make me more
comfortable to ask 0uestions since a lot of the material was not very clear. I would also
have taken some time to go over previous meetings with Dr. +tewart so that I had
background knowledge going into the meeting because I think that this would help me
understand what was being discussed.