Cleveland Principal resigns
From this morning's P-I:
Principal quits job at Cleveland High School
P-I STAFF
Cleveland High School Principal Donna Marshall has resigned and will be replaced by interim principal Wayne Floyd, school district officials announced Thursday. Marshall said she was leaving to be with her family in Atlanta.
Floyd has been Cleveland's assistant principal for the past four years, and previously worked at Wing Luke Elementary and Garfield High School. Charles Chinn, a former Seattle Public Schools teacher and principal, will serve as a consultant and help with the leadership transition at Cleveland.
The district plans to begin the search for a permanent principal later this school year.
Principal quits job at Cleveland High School
P-I STAFF
Cleveland High School Principal Donna Marshall has resigned and will be replaced by interim principal Wayne Floyd, school district officials announced Thursday. Marshall said she was leaving to be with her family in Atlanta.
Floyd has been Cleveland's assistant principal for the past four years, and previously worked at Wing Luke Elementary and Garfield High School. Charles Chinn, a former Seattle Public Schools teacher and principal, will serve as a consultant and help with the leadership transition at Cleveland.
The district plans to begin the search for a permanent principal later this school year.
Comments
You will notice that the web page introduces our new counselor, Ray
Willis and gives his contact information: Ray Willis is the new Garfield
Counselor for students whose last names begin with the letters G - Li.
Im sorry- but I don't feel comfortable with this guy as a counselor- he is supposed to be advising teens?
html
The Washington Interscholastic Activities Association stripped the Chief Sealth High School girls basketball team of its two state championships and forced it to forfeit all of its games for the past four seasons for illegally recruiting players........
A Seattle School District investigation in April found that Chief Sealth coach Ray Willis and assistants Laura Fuller and Amos Walters lured five players to the school with promises of starting spots and college scholarships — all in violation of state high-school athletic rules, which don't allow recruiting of any kind.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/
html/sports/2003152336_sealth26m.html
As Willis obstensibly wanted to move on to college coaching, getting fired from two high schools in a row, ( Eastside Catholic & Sealth), doesn't look so good on the CV.
What troubles me is the way schools continue shuffling people around long after they've proven they're not fit to be in a school. Remember Al Jones, Dan Barton?
The news is full of school professionals who abuse their power and get away it. It never ends. I agreed to a background check so that I can volunteer at our school. What about school employees?
WenG- I have followed this in the paper. All three coaches continue to deny the recruiting allegations.
That doesn't change the fact that all three coaches recruited students from outside the district, sometimes providing faked leases so they could enroll with a Seattle address. Ye gods, Tracy Libros must be very busy not to have caught those particular applications.
Willis has legal rights. He can fight to regain his job as a coach. He can argue that SPS discriminated against him. That still doesn't make him a desirable fixture as a high school counselor. How many Sealth students did he hurt by illegally recruiting?
So we've gone pretty far off topic, but does anyone know why Donna Marshall left? She was an experienced principal. She took over at RBHS after Maria Cano-Hinz had her contract bought out. It seems like she’s come into some difficult situations for SPS. Why did she leave?
Actually, all three coaches are still claiming that they did not do this. In addition to the laswsuits against the district, they also filed a lawsuit against the parents who claimed that the coaches recruited them, specifically, the parents who claimed they were given fake leases. So far, the district has had the cases dismissed, Mr. Willis is appealing the ruling against him, the assistants filed another lawsuit against the district after thier first case was dismissed.
Do I think Willis is a bad guy who should not be coaching? Absolutely. Why is he still a counselor? Dime to donoughts the union stepped in to protect him as a certificated teacher. Ask SEA why they continue to defend him.
I do not condone "faking leases", or lying or cheating in any way.
That said, I am pleased to see three coaches taking athletics seriously in Seattle. Recruiting goes on all over the country. It is what good coaches do. It is what colleges do. It seems that our inner city schools are no where near as competitive in the sports arena as our suburban neighbor schools.
I do agree sports are part of a comprehensive high school experience, but I don't agree that we should be comparing ourselves to the "suburbs as the standard"
Perhaps you may have read ....
Volleydogs win national academic award for sixth time
or
Ten years ago, a bus carrying Garfield High School's inner-city volleyball team pulled into the parking lot of an affluent high school on the Sammamish Plateau. Our young athletes stared with wonder; few realized that a public school could look so clean, modern and spacious. One said she felt as if we'd arrived at a mall. Another wondered if she'd see any non-white faces on the campus.
That same year, players for a different Eastside team made the short drive across the lake for their first visit to Garfield's historic gym. This time, our visitors did the staring; the graffiti, the filthy bathrooms, the raucous hallways made some tremble and others sneer. Most seemed anxious to get back on the bus the moment the match ended.
Why, then, were we in the same league?
By 1996, three storied Seattle schools -- Garfield, Roosevelt and Franklin -- had grown much larger than the rest of their Metro League brethren, and were forced to set off in search of a new athletic home.
An invitation came from across Lake Washington, home to the suburban schools of the KingCo Conference. Initial concerns about increased time and expense of travel were trumped by a rather idealistic consideration: It would be a unique opportunity to bridge the social, racial and economic divide between city and suburb. Ballard opened its newer, larger campus, and joined us in 2002.
In most sports, the first few years were difficult. Eastside schools, with superior facilities, weight rooms, financial support and strong junior-high sports programs, regularly mowed down those of us in the city. At one point, the Garfield varsity volleyball team lost 36 matches in a row.
More important, there seemed to be little meaningful dialogue between opposing schools. City schools thought suburban kids were spoiled and superficial; Eastside kids assumed we were undisciplined and possibly dangerous.
But everything changed.
Several city sports began to emerge as statewide powers. Champions arose in swimming, tennis, cross country and track and field; city teams in soccer and gymnastics became contenders. Garfield's volleyball team improved to become one of the best in the league, while Ballard's football team reached the state-championship game. Boys and girls basketball continued to dominate.
Best of all, walls started crumbling.
Kids from the city and suburbs began to see each other as something other than clichés. In volleyball, Seattle girls joined offseason club teams and became close friends with Eastside players. Volleyball coaches began meeting several times a year, forging friendships of their own. Kids began to see beyond the graffiti and the spacious hallways and started looking forward to visiting each other's gyms.
Now, however, some within the Seattle School District want to dismantle those bridges we worked so hard to build.
Ostensibly, the district tells us it has become too expensive to pay for all those cheese buses to cross the lake. They also claim that lengthy commutes to the Eastside force students to miss classroom time.
But those reasons don't add up....
http://www.heartofthegame.org/web/home.htm
I see city teams represented pretty well in either champion or runner up AAAA categories
http://www.wiaa.com/athletics/basketball/pastchamp/4agirlschamps.html
Whatchutalkinbout- city sports aren't competitive?
I also think that there are far more important things the city counselors and coaches should be teaching our kids- than "winning is the only thing"
How about the payoff of hard work & the value of honesty. Working with what you have & being proud of the effort that you put in.
Knowing that the opportunity to cheat was there- but that you had the strength to stick to core values and teach the players skills they can take to other arenas.
Teaching teens that it is OK to be deceitful if you gain from it & it is OK to blame others if you get caught- is not the sort of thing I want my kids to be learning.
The bus charge is by the hour for the driver, not by distance. It is just as far for students at Ballard to go to Rainer Beach and Sealth (through city traffic) than it is for them to go north, or to use the express lanes to zip over the bridge.
It is not fair for RB (less than 400 students) to be asked to compete against Roosevelt or Ballard (1500-1700 students).
It is eqaully unfair to take away the opportunity to play on JV, C squad, and freshman teams from the students at Roosevelt, Ballard, and Garfield because the smaller schools cannot field three or more teams (some barely field one).
Franklin has trouble being competive in sports other than basketball. They are likely to drop down into AAA anyway, putting them back into Metro. Even if they don't, they can always elect to join an indepedent league for sports in which they cannot field a team capable of competing against the AAAA schools.
It was difficult- the Eckstein girls would come rolling out with their matching bags and jackets- the Summit team would valiantly try to score, and the Eckstein parents would make cracks about the Invaders on the way back to the parking lot after the game.
I don't think there are many advantages for the team from a small school, that is at a lower level of competitiveness- to be playing schools which are 3x as big- with students who are often on community select teams as well.
And what advantages are there for students who are planning on getting athletic scholarships in college? An easy win for their team? An opportunity to feel relieved they don't attend a school where the sport is "less" important?
Not much opportunity to really show what they can do, if their opponents aren't equally prepared.
When you choose a small school you have choosen small school, intimate community over larger more institutional schools that field competitive sports teams, national award winning bands, etc. This is the trade off that YOU make when YOU choose a small school. You can't have it both ways.
Anonymous at 10:15 said "I also think that there are far more important things the city counselors and coaches should be teaching our kids- than "winning is the only thing""
While winning isn't everything, anyone who has had a child on a team knows how demoralizing it is to be on a consistently loosing team. to loose 36 volleyball game in a row, is demoralizing to every student on that team. Or as in Hales case where they didn't win a football game in years. No, winning isn't everything, but their is merit in working hard, getting the satisfaction of it all paying off, at least sometimes.
Last I checked, the national award winning bands are at schools that are oversubscribed.
You need to keep in mind that many families (including anyone who lived 1.8 miles away from Roosevelt) may have wanted to get into a school that "field(s) competitive sports teams, national award winning bands" but did not get in.
There is no reason to punish the smaller comprehensive HS that don't choose to be small (RB, Cleveland, Sealth, Ingraham) by having them compete against schools that literally have four times as many students.
Nor is there an excuse for parents to be snotty to other schools in parking lots...
didn't say I wanted it both ways
I however think schools should be in leagues by size- not district or category.
When a student from a "small intimate school", where try outs aren't necessary and the "coach" very well may be a parent- who is helping out the teacher who played in college, but never coached before- chooses to play on his school team-should he expect to be playing teams who are led by full time coaches?
Where the coaches are so aggressively recruiting players that it attracts national attention?
Teams that have such a stressful weed out process that players vomit before and after tryouts
Or should this student expect to be playing other teams with roughly same view of the game- they are playing because they like to play- that no one who shows up for practice is cut & everyone gets a chance during each game on the field.
Don't try to change the way that the district schedules games, or the way that schools with strong sports programs field their teams, or make digs about the way they handle try outs (kids vomiting). try outs have been around since sports have been around. My kids love try outs. They appreciate a good coach that takes the game seriously and want to play on a competitive team. They don't want to play recreationally, they want to play competitively. There is nothing wrong with this, and they should not put down simply because Summit doesn't have coaches, or enough interest to field a strong team. Perhaps the community centers or arranging games between alternative schools and k-8's would work for you????
This is about the smaller SPS High Schools competing against the SPS High Schools three and four times bigger. Classof75 posted an example of poor sportsmanship exhibited by Eckstien parents, but the core discussion was about High Schools.
Nearly ever high school competes in leagues based on school size. Right now, at least RB would be a AA school if size alone were being looked at, and is already playing against larger AAA schools. If all SPS schoosl returned to Metro- the proposition Mel was advocating - the very small high schools would be playing against AAAA schools, which would not be fair to either group.
The smaller schools could not compete, and the larger schools would loose the benifit of having multiple learning squads.
The point was that none of the high schools that are part of this discussion are alternative schools, and that many people may not have "chosen" to attend a smaller school thereby choosing to forgo a strong sports program, they may have had to attend a smaller school because the larger schools are oversubsribed.
AAAA are the largest schools in the state, and have to have 1500 students in grades 10-12. (This is because WIAA system was created in the days of 6-9 Jr. Highs and 10- High Schools). The letter rankings also factor in a percentage of students who are home-schooled, attend private school, or alternative schools who play with thier local high school.
The WIAA reclassfies every few years, so it is likley that when this happens next year, Franklin will drop back to AAA, and RB may be dropped to AA.