School Committee Meeting

Minutes

March 21, 2005

In Attendance: Norm Ferrari, Ralph Utzman, Patti Crawford, April Vestal, Richard Meckstroth, Brenda Michael, Kim Robinson, Carla Campbell, Elizabeth Richmond,

Approval of November 15, 2004 Minutes – The minutes were approved by the committee with the correction under Levels Policy Discussion to add: “WVSOM will still require 3 months of rural and will not offer the option to opt out.” after the first sentence.

Old Business

Joint Outreach/Schools Service Learning task force meeting – The committee discussed the progress of the February Service Learning seminar in which service learning projects were linked with clinical/curricular learning objectives. Not all partners were present at this meeting, so the committee decided it would be appropriate to further develop these projects and learning objective linkages by holding a 3 hour joint meeting at the June 13 meetings in Flatwoods. The committee suggested inviting all partners to this meeting, having an evaluation presentation from Jodie Jackson on community service/service learning and discussing the community service/service learning evaluation form developed by the School of Dentistry. In addition, partners can provide input into the service learning projects developed at the meeting in February and further clarify and develop these with the goal of having a manual at each RHEP/AHEC site for use by students.

Levels Policy Discussion/Update – the committee discussed policy 2004-02 “Policy Statement to Encourage a More Even Distribution of Medical Students.” Indications from WVU are that there are a lot of requests for level III sites. WVU is marking these requests as “high priority” in TRACKER. Things seem to be going ok. A Marshall representative was not present to provide input into how this is going for them. It is not applicable to WVSOM.

New Business

IDS Discussion – Dr. Ferrari discussed his concern over interdisciplinary sessions in RHEP. He said that IDS has the highest level of dissatisfaction on student evaluations and suggested that it may have outlived its life. He also posed the question on why should we continue to do IDS and if we do continue, how do we make it better? There was discussion of the new IDS policy which allows for interdisciplinary experiences as an option to IDS. This policy has not been in effect for very long and it is difficult to see whether this has changed the view of IDS at this point. The Faculty Development Committee is reviewing this information and will be providing further training to OSCD’s at the September conference. Ralph said that SERFE data on IDS has indicated that many IDS sessions are not interdisciplinary. Dr. Meckstroth said that dentistry’s biggest complaint is that IDS should be more of a team concept and many times it is not. He encouraged other ways of doing IDS experiences. The school committee will also monitor this information.

With no further business, the meeting was adjourned.