Any other suggestions or needs may be discussed further with Dr. Paul Shin through email at alchemy@csun.edu or by telephone (818) 677-6887.  Finally for those interested, the 39th Western Regional meeting will be held October 27-30 at the Doubletree Hotel in Sacramento, CA this year.  For information about the Saturday session go to:  Teachers Session 

**As an aside, In response to the request for student field trips and laboratory access for high school students, Barbara Sitzman reminded participants that October 30th is Science Day at USC. (See information provided below.)

Barbara Sitzman reported on the very successful ChemCom Workshop that was held in August at Pepperdine University this summer.  Many of our Group members attended and all agreed that this was a very worthwhile training and collaboration opportunity and encourage others to attend.  Debbie Bennett attended the Workshop and felt that it was all very worthwhile and applicable to teaching chemistry regardless of ChemCom program adoption.  Barbara also announced that teachers can now join the Southern Section of the ACS as a Teacher Affiliate for only $10 to receive member materials and made the applications available to the group.

Dean Gilbert of the Los Angeles County Office of Education described a vast offering of training opportunities, presentations and available materials from LACOE.  He suggested regularly visiting the LACOE website www.lacoe.edu/science to review upcoming opportunities. He reported that the next CSTA Conference will be held October 14-17 in San Jose and also mentioned that there is now a call for presenters for the 2006 NSTA Convention to be held in Anaheim.  Dean was able to provide a huge list of upcoming Roundtable discussions and presentations too numerous to list in the minutes however all are available for review through his website:  www.lacoe.edu/science  He also discussed the change in Science Fair project application procedures, the revised science literature list available on his website and began an extensive discussion on No Child Left Behind legislation and LACOE's involvement with program development.  He further announced that the Science Olympiad will be held in Feb/March at Cal Poly Pomona.  Dean's detailed presentation led the group into a discussion with changes that are taking place within the Los Angeles School District with Standards-based assessments.

Diane Watkins and Dave Kukla discussed the plans for development of standards-based assessments that will be provided to science teachers by LAUSD. They stressed that these assessments were not intended as any form of teacher accountability assessment but only for determination of student progress in understanding the content standards for the purpose of instructional improvement.  She stated that the assessments being designed are very much in the same style as Grade 4-8 Science Instructional Guides that were previously developed.  There was further discussion of rumors about the District removing the ChemCom textbook from the Approved Textbook list.  While it appeared that perhaps there might have been some discussion at the District level to do this, Dave Kukla stated that the District is "rethinking" this problem.  ChemCom is a thematic approach to chemistry instruction and integrates the content standards throughout the program making it difficult to assess a group of content standards in traditional form.

The question was asked if the District is developing student assessment tools at the secondary level (Science Instructional Guides) why they have neglected to ask teacher professionals for input and participation of the development of these tools.  Judie Baumwirt suggested that the exemplary teachers who regularly participate in the CSUN High School Chemistry Teacher Group would be an excellent resource for the District yet questioned why we have never been contacted for input.  Neither Diane Watkins or Dave Kukla could respond to these questions, however it was countered that perhaps a forum could be held in the Valley to allow science teachers to hear directly about the District plans for assessment development and possibly make suggestion as to what should and should not be included.  Diane Watkins stated that she could not guarantee that suggestions would be incorporated into the assessments being developed but that she would be open to providing a forum for the exchange.  Judie Baumwirt stated that she would be happy to host and advertise this forum for LAUSD High School Science Teachers under the auspices of the CSUN High School Chemistry Teacher Support Group.

New Business:

Judie Baumwirt described several projects that are currently under development.  The first activity is the Student Preparedness Survey which was collaboratively designed by teachers across the US to identify differences in prerequisties and student preparedness for chemistry.  Anyone interested in participating can pick up the 50 item questionnaire and forward completed scantrons through school mail for inclusion in the study. 

Another activity currently under development is called the Global Lab Project that being designed in collaboration with Patti Mason of Lafayette, IN for national student group participation.  The selected lab will focus on water samples collected throughout the US and determine the calcium and/or chlorine content of local drinking water as it relates to the physical geography of the collection area for comparison.  The lab will be designed with an interactive online component to enable instructors to post their class results online for evaluation.  Experiences in conducting this "Global Lab" will be reported at the upcoming ChemEd Conference in Vancouver, Summer of 2005.  Teacher were polled for interest in conducting this lab which will required its integration into the spring semester content.  The general response and interest in participating from Group members was positive.

Dr. Andy Peterson mentioned that the previous use of chlorine for water purification by the MWD has been changed to chloramines and that we might be interested in looking at the change in lead content as this new treatment will undoubtedly result in increased lead content within the MWD area.  Suggestion was made to contact Russ Donnelly, Education Unit Manager with the MWD for more details.  Other resources were discussed with Carole Smith mentioning possible instructional materials that are available from the Disney Environmentality (Jiminy Cricket) project. 

Another project is the development of a series of labs and activities called "Everything and Anything you can do with AlkaSeltzer and film cannisters" which also will be presented at the ChemEd Conference with Patti Mason.  Judie asked that if anyone has activities that would be appropriate for this presentation having to do with AlkaSeltzer OR film cannisters to please share their suggestions or ideas.

Myrna Fleming announced that a Chemistry Teacher position may become available at Birmingham High School and requested that any participants knew of strong candidates to please contact her and Najwa Takiedowe, Student Teacher, Granada Hills Charter HS was introduced as one such candidate.

Schedule of Upcoming Meetings and Topics:
The following schedule and tentative meeting topics were suggested by the attendees: