Community Meetings

As I mentioned earlier in the post about ex-town manager Joe Derouche and mayor Robert E. Macdonald, our third graders have been researching communities this spring semester. Part of our studies was discovering the process and purpose of the town meeting. During the last full week of school, students hosted a set of four mock meetings following some basic rules of a typical town meeting.


Our first town meeting was actually a class community meeting discussing the class hallway expectations. Students had to debate the punishment for talking repeatedly in the hall because we had been having so many issues lately. We argued points saying all students would owe time for one student's talking and points saying that the student talking would be the student who owed the time. Everyone did a great job debating both sides and in the end we did a vote by hands to find that the student who spoke would be the student who owed the time. That argument won unanimously. Go figure!

The following three days and three town meetings were more directly related to the three communities we were studying: Gorham, Mexico, and Lewiston, ME. All meetings had to do with school issues that are actually relevant within the communities such as combining schools between districts, renewing schools with no budget, and moving the Pre-K students to a new building. Students were full of wonderful insights on each topic and really enjoyed the process of arguing an opinion and voting as a community. We also practiced skills such as secretary notation and moderator of the meeting itself. In the end, we learned a lot about what it takes to run a community and how things aren't always as easy as we think they are.