Seattle Schools Community Forum

When we last left Tracy Castro-Gill, former head of Ethnic Studies for SPS, she had been exited from SPS by Superintendent Denise Juneau. She was the program manager from September 2018- June 2020. She went on to create a group, Washington Ethnic Studies Now. That group advocates for Ethnic Studies in Washington State K-12 public education.  They now go by they/them and they claim to have fulfilled the requirements for their online PhD.  The backstory to Ethnic Studies in SPS is from the summer of 2017 when the Board passed a resolution in support of ethnic studies "for all students in the Seattle Public Schools." This resolution had support from the Seattle chapter of the NAACP and SEA. Castro Gill likes to make it sound like she was the first to teach Ethnic Studies in SPS but it was, in fact, teacher Jesse Hagopian at Garfield High School.  After that resolution, several schools volunteered to pilot Ethnic Studies core content later that year.  There was an Ethnic...

Several of my readers have mentioned that former assistant superintendent, Keisha Scarlett, has returned to Seattle. She brings with her a lot of baggage. Dr. Scarlett was with SPS for more than a decade and has been a teacher, principal, Chief Academic Officer and, in what turned out to be very short-term, superintendent.  In her last years at SPS, there were two major items about Scarlett.  One, she and Manal Al-ansi, an Executive Director, filed a formal complaint to the School Board about their treatment by then-Board director Chandra Hampson and then-Board director Zachary DeWolf. An investigation - demanded by Hampson and DeWolf - then blew up in the directors' faces as they were found to have committed HIB (harassment, intimidation, and bullying) against the two women. (They were both found not to have done it for racial reasons. It is worth noting that both Scarlett and Al-ansi are Black and Hampson and DeWolf are both Native American.) However, it was striking that th...

The series is a four-part one adapted by Jack Thorne (creator of "Adolescence" which was another great four-series), based on the William Golding novel. I saw the original 1963 black and white film, presented as a documentary, and it was very good. There was a 1990 film with the cast being American but I didn't see that one. I think it works better with British boys because of the more obvious class system in Great Britain. The four leads are very, very good. For three of them, this is their first filmed work; all have been in plays. I will note that the series changes the timing of a couple of events from the book but I had no problem with that. It also adds one thing that gets some of the boys more involved in looking different from the other boys. The tension starts early and does not let up. Some of what happens still shocks. As Thorne says: “As a society, we’re having a conversation right now about boys,” he says. “We’re losing a generation of boys, and we’re losing ...

Update: From KUOW , a report on a cyberattack at Washington State universities. The online platform used by teachers to communicate with students at major Washington universities suffered a global outage Thursday after it was reportedly hacked. Teachers and students were unable to access their classes or send messages through the Canvas platform. Canvas is the primary learning management system at state universities including the University of Washington, Western Washington University, Central Washington University, and Eastern Washington University. In an update at 4 p.m. Thursday, the University of Washington reported that Canvas assured users “they have found no indication that passwords, dates of birth, government identifiers, or financial information was involved in the cybersecurity incident."   Also from KUOW , a live event - Adults in the Room . Thursday, June 18th at Seattle Central Library from 7-8:30 pm.  Following the conclusion of Adults in the Room, the newest se...

From the New York Times:  The 2025-26 academic year is coming to a close, and we have a post  describing 10 ways to reflect on these last months and learn from them. But the 10 ways aren’t just for students — we also hope teachers can benefit from them. In fact, we would be delighted if teachers and students did some of the exercises together and told us what happened!   We invite you to post a comment reflecting on any aspect of this school year that you would like to make public, and we have provided some questions below to get you started.   We hope, too, that you will not only post your own reflections but also comment on the thoughts of others. As always, our staff will moderate comments , and we can’t wait to learn from you.   Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will...

I was very sad to see this Seattle Times' story . Those of you with teens in SPS, did you receive any messaging on this for students who use public transportation? I see nothing at the SPS website but I thought perhaps it came individually. I'm not sure I have ever seen data on how many SPS students take public transportation to school. Anyone?  King County prosecutors charged a man Wednesday with rape and kidnapping, two days after they say he lured a teenage girl from a bus stop into a wooded area of Seattle’s Northgate neighborhood to sexually assault her.   The girl, 15, was waiting near Northgate Station for a bus to take her to school around 8:30 a.m. Monday when a man approached her on a bicycle on Fifth Avenue Northeast, just north of Northeast 103rd Street. The man asked her how old she was, and the girl answered him because she didn’t want to be rude, according to police. He then told the girl she was attractive and asked her to join him in the woods nearby, the girl...