Seattle Schools Community Forum

Update 3: The Board - without explanation - started the meeting 45 minutes late. They had been in an executive session prior to the meeting so I surmise they ran late there.  New president Gina Topp noted that former director Jan Kumasaka died. She was native to the Puget Sound region until 1942 when she was four and her family was removed and sent to an internment camp in California.  The family did return to Seattle where Kumasaka graduated from Franklin High School. She was the first Asian American on the Seattle School Board and served from 1997-2005. She was an advocate for bilingual education.  I recall her as tough but fair.  Superintendent Brent Jones comments included that he and some Board members had attended a Washington State School Directors Association conference last week as well as the upcoming Black Lives Matter at School Week. The student directors read a proclamation on behalf of the latter.  I was unable to find this proclamation at the dist...

 Just to tell you, first-person, there is NO emergency at our southern border in Arizona. Does immigration policy need an overhaul? Sure, but it's not the emergency that it is being portrayed. If there was, I'd be the first to speak up and demand help. We lead peaceful lives and sleep well at night.

Update: Topp did not get the nod; that went to Brianna Thomas. Topp continues on as Board president. End of update   A reader commented on another thread:  You could change the headline of this item to "Goodbye President Topp." She was the top recommended candidate to the County Council by the district Democratic Party committee, and seems like a sure thing now to enter the legislature. Another commenter said that Topp had a huge lead over any of the other candidates and... Topp was a breath of fresh air as board chair for Seattle schools. Now their very dysfunctional group could be facing a very hard choice of getting a new person on board at a time of severe challenges. Maybe Leslie Harris would volunteer to be a place holder? From the West Seattle Blog: WHAT’S NEXT:   After ratification by the KC Democrats, the names go to the County Council, who will make their decision Tuesday. Public comment will be accepted at the council’s 11 am meeting, either in pers...

From Tech Crunch (bold mine): On January 7, at 11:10 p.m. in Dubai, Romy Backus received an email from education technology giant PowerSchool notifying her that the school she works at was one of the victims of a data breach that the company discovered on December 28. PowerSchool said hackers had accessed a cloud system that housed a trove of students’ and teachers’ private information, including Social Security numbers, medical information, grades, and other personal data from schools all over the world.  Given that PowerSchool bills itself as the largest provider of cloud-based education software for K-12 schools — some 18,000 schools and more than 60 million students — in North America, the impact could be “massive,” as one tech worker at an affected school told TechCrunch. Sources at school districts impacted by the incident told TechCrunch that hackers accessed “all” their student and teacher historical data stored in their PowerSchool-provided systems.  D...

As I previously reported, the district is embarking this month on a series of community meetings about the upcoming levies in February. One is the Operations levy, the other is the BEX/BTA levy for buildings.  FOX 13 had a story about a meeting this week. I found some of the comments, well, interesting. While the year's operation's levy hasn't had much pushback, critics say the capital levy is causing controversy, including concerns it will lead to school closures. While there has been notice in previous levies about scattered disagreement, this sounds bigger than usual. "Seattle Public Schools has 106 schools. We have facility needs we are going to place before the voters," said Richard Best, Executive Director of Capital Projects, Planning and Facilities of Seattle Public Schools.  "That would be, I won’t say catastrophic, but there will be declining systems that could have consequential implications in that, when we do implement that system repair, it cos...

  KUOW  had a recent sweet story on the smaller schools that had faced closure and how their communities embrace them.  Parents like the staff or the focus or inclusivity or all of those.  The story mentions the John Stanford International School. That mention reminded me of a comment at The Seattle Times about the budget hole. In the story, one person said their children was taking Mandarin at Concord International School and how much it meant to their family. The comment said something to the effect that it was all good and well but now, at this point, those schools are something of a luxury the district can't afford. I have always wanted to see this programming expand even more throughout the district but even getting the immersion schools that SPS has now was like pulling teeth. But I perceive that dual language immersion schools are more costly than other Option schools. Am I wrong? I note that the story also mentions the many supporters of school librarians are...