They Have Go To Back To School Sometime
Tomorrow will be August 5th marking that school will start again in exactly one month. Is summer dragging for your kids? Are you looking forward to it or dreading the organizational work that is getting a kid off to school each day? Is your child starting a new school or a new level (i.e. moving from elementary to middle)?
This post can be an Open Thread for anything about education you'd like to discuss; I just tossed off school start-up as a place to start.
This post can be an Open Thread for anything about education you'd like to discuss; I just tossed off school start-up as a place to start.
Comments
However- that can be a long way to walk in the morning- when you are rushed & when we live at the bottom of a hill and the high school is at the bottom on the other side.( the road is also not what I would consider safe for bicyclists)
She has taken Metro in the morning- but as the posted time is just a "guideline", it might get her there 5 minutes early- or as is more often the case- 6 minutes late.
If we dumped the articulated buses, if we had more buses scheduled, then it would be much easier. They don't even need to change the routes- just add more buses!
I also think summer could either be 10 weeks longer- or go to year round school where we have more, evenly spaced breaks.
This summer is sad- because she is my youngest & she is a senior.
She has been having a great summer- being a counselor- but I am missing having her around.
Easier said than done. Labor is Metro's largest cost, by far - more buses = more drivers = the Metro budget probably can't support that.
Can't mandate kids to ride Metro when it doesn't work for them.
They offer yellow bus to Laurelhurst because there is no Metro service.
They offer homeless kids taxi rides so they can get to school.
Can't turn the other cheek on the middle/working class. They deserve service too.
When my kids were at AE2, it often took almost 90 minutes for their bus to arrive at Laurelhurst, where they attended the aftercare program. They left AE2 at 3:10 for a 2 mile trip. I spoke to transpo and the driver, and there weren't any plans to add a bus. WenG
Then maybe we need to do something about that-
public transportation in Seattle sux
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/
pacificnw/2003/0202/cover.html
I go to Portland and Vancouver ( BC)
quite frequently
There is no reason why it should be car dependent to get around Seattle in a timely fashion.
( I applaud those who ride bikes- but our roads aren't maintained well enough for that really to be a safe option IMO- a friend recently hit a hole and put his femur through his hip joint-)
What the hell are we paying such high property taxes for?
Why has my 107 year old house- increased in assessed value every year $20,000 to $50,000 and taxed accordingly?
We have fewer police per capita than other major cities- a school district where the graduation rate is very sad considering we are also one of the most highly educated cities in the country.
Jobs that don't pay a living wage & a public transportation system that isn't reliable & that goes completely out of commission once a storm hits.
(BTW- could we possibly get some sand on some of our roads this winter? lets look at the weather forecast guys and anticipate problems-Kthx)
Seriously- I have spent a lot of time in Portland( my older daughter stayed there after college graduation) & it is much more liveable- the schools also seem to be better even though the district has less money than we do.
( However I do see that the on time graduation rate is about the same as Seattles- However Oregon requires 22 credits for graduation- Washington requires 19)
THat doesn't even make SENSE!
if they were just outside the walk boundary & were the first off at the end of the day and the last on in the morning- wouldn't they have one of the shortest bus rides?
No wonder we are spending so much on transportation!
The kids are getting the Gilligan's Island two hour tour every day!
Perhaps we should have the Professor design the bus routes instead?
Have to under federal law. Get funded for this under federal law. See the tie?
I hope all the northeast parents who feel entitled to send their kids to their closest neighborhood school don't also feel entitled to send their kid to a school that isn't overcrowded.
Wedgwood, Bryant, View Ridge, Laurelhurst, Eckstein, and Roosevelt are all already overfull. No matter how much right-sizing of reference areas and such happens, the fact that families can relocate to a new residence combined with guaranteed access to families within the reference area is going to result in the current levels of overcrowding or worse in highly popular schools like these ones.
Be careful what you wish for - you just might get it.
This "entitlement" and "elitist" guilt may work at AS1 where you are a parent, but in the real world it is just kind of irritating. Try to use common sense, and take the disdain for NE parents out of it. No kid should sit on a bus for two hours. Every kid should be able to go to the school in THEIR neighborhood if they choose to.
You and Charlie always complain about the district not allowing authentic communication, and listening to parents concerns. Now they have finally heard us (the majority) who want neighborhood schools, and they are responding. We have a new uperintendant who is action oriented (Go Dr. Gooloe) and I am hopeful that the futire is bright.
I am thankful to see progress on the horizon. For the whole city.
What I am saying is that as soon as a school assignment plan based on guaranteed access for reference areas is implemented, many families will make decisions about where they choose to live (or about relocating) based on those reference areas. As a result, the schools that I mentioned may end up struggling to keep up with increasing enrollment, and they are already overfull.
I'm not pessimistic. People can figure out for themselves whether sending their kid to Roosevelt when it has 2000 students is worth it to them. I submit that this may be a situation that people face in the not-too-distant future under a revised enrollment system.
In elementary, in the NE cluster there are already reference areas drawn with almost 100% certainty of getting that reference school. Do to the NE school's popularity, it is difficult to get in Wedgwood, View Ridge or Bryant (in Kindergarten anyway) if you live outside the reference area. Laurelhurst is a bit easier but I believe that is because that neighborhood sends so many people to private school. The only thing I might see increasing is people with older kids moving to the neighborhood if they are assured a spot in the school 2 blocks away.
High school I may see more of a problem with this. This is especially true because the Ravenna area around Roosevelt is becoming so much more dense adding more housing to the area really close to the school. Maybe it will make the district act to add capacity and look at a school's popularity, why it is popular and duplicate it elsewhere to satisfy demand.
Maybe it is time the district starts replicating these attractive programs, and, perhaps placing Marni Campbell (Eckstein's principal) at Hale is a start.
I hope Goodloe Johnson keeps up the momentum.
Did you really suggest that if parents in the NE cluster want their kids to go to their neighborhood school, they are going to have to accept over crowding?
I think not.
If there are enough kids in our neighborhood to over crowd a school then the district will have to add capacity won't they. If you drop your animosity toward the families in the NE cluster, and think about this from the students perspective, even you might have a different perspective.
Stop persecuting families for living in NE Seattle. Our kids, like all other kids, should be able to go to their neighborhood school. Minus the over crowding, and two hour bus commute. Geez.
I agree that if overcrowding persists, the district should add capacity, but I got rather vigorously attacked on a different thread for suggesting that SPS should build a high school in Interbay for a neighborhood that can justifiably say they have no neighborhood high school whatsoever (and the argument used against me was based on "SPS has all this excess capacity"). I am not trying to persecute northeast Seattle. I'm just saying that overcrowding is likely to get worse and that any new capacity is going to be slow (as in, many years) in coming given the current political environment, in which SPS is perceived to have gobs of excess capacity (not a true perception, IMHO, but its still there).
Yes, every child should be able to go to a neighborhood school that is of high quality, not overcrowded, and not have a two hour bus commute. I support all of that. I'm just not convinced its going to happen without one heck of a lot of hard work by an awful lot of people and some major shifts in attitudes among portions of our political leadership. Just wishing for it isn't going to make it happen.
To all of those who apparently are feeling defensive about being labeled as "feeling entitled" to anything, I apologize for even using any words associated with entitlement - I apparently hit a nerve that I didn't mean to.
My parents bought where they could afford- apparently back in 1961- it was between Kirkland or West Seattle.
West Seattle was very close to my my dads work- but still kind of a PITA to get there.
They had a brand new house built in Bridle Trails and I was able to walk to elementary/jr high & high school. ( however- that doesn't mean I received a strong education or even that I graduated from high school)
Still, even though we were living next to Beaux Arts when we had our oldest- we moved to the city- but we moved to where we could afford-
Families can't count on a program being offered, on the school being wonderful or even open
We can't penalize people because they don't choose to live in Hawthorne Hills.
Assume that this number is bumped up 5% by students who are currently in private schools that return to public schools based on guaranteed access to reference area schools. Based on anecdotal evidence regarding why people go private, this number may be low.
Also assume that the population of families with school age children grows by 5% per year as a result of new families moving into the area, enticed by guaranteed access to quality reference area schools. I think this number could also end up being a low estimate.
Also assume that the school board votes tomorrow to immediately begin the process of building a new elementary school in the cluster. I'll be optimistic and say that if this were to happen (it isn't going to, but that's beside the point), it could be ready to take students by the fall of 2011.
By the fall of 2010, based on these assumptions, the population of elementary school children potentially trying to get seats in a northeast elementary would be 3,155. The planning capacity (from this SPS spreadsheet) for these six elementaries is 2,471. The usefulness of capacity numbers is always dependant on the assumptions used to create them (same for the accuracy of enrollment projections), but if these numbers are realistic possibilities, as I believe they are, then the possibility that northeast elementaries would be 25-30% over capacity within 3 years is a very real possibility.
I am not saying that this is right, and I am not wishing for it. I am not attacking people who live in northeast Seattle. I am just pointing out that severe overcrowding is a distinct possibility. Even if SPS took action tomorrow (which as I said, they aren't likely to) to start adding facilities, buildings still can't be built in a day, and overcrowding may just be something people have to live with for the near to mid-term.
Then pull out home school kids, APP kids that go to Lowell, and special ed and ELL kids that go to schools out of cluster.
Doesn't eliminate over crowding, but may make it less dire than you predicted.
I was interested in a few things said like:
"A common thread was ensuring that our children received a high-quality education in a safe, no-nonsense environment."
I have written about my discomfort in some of the behavior I have seen in some of my son's classes. Dan Dempsey (running in District 6) is the only candidate that even vaguely addresses this issue. He mentioned it last night at the forum saying there were RCW laws but teachers were discouraged from using them. I would likely agree that private schools (no matter their form) have stricter behavior policies than public schools.
He also said this:
It is a fact that most public school families in Seattle are not property owners. So most of the public school students' families are not financially supporting the schools their children attend. Obviously, that burden is falling on the property owners who are retired, childless and those who choose to send their children to private schools.
Except for "civic pride," is there any other good reason that the 80-year-old woman down the street on a limited income should be paying for public education, or the 90-year-old man across the street in his wheelchair, because they both happen to own their homes and property?"
I'd have to see where he got the fact that most people with kids in SPS don't own property. It could be so but I'd just like to know where he got it.
He talks of the "burden" of educating kids and the only benefit to society being "civic pride". Well, I can point out, sir, do you want an working economy? You have to have an educated populace, plain and simple. (I tell my son and his friends to go to school and get smart so they can pay for my Social Security - we baby boomers are going to pack the SS rolls and we need every kid educated. The money has to come from somewhere.) So if only for that plus the fact that educated people are far less likely to be criminals, you'll want to bear that "burden".
Beyond that, our government decided, a long time ago, that it is the moral thing to do to educate children.
Any prediction about the future is at best an educated guess, and we set ourselves up for trouble if our plans aren't flexible enough to take that little fact of life into account (kind of like selling Queen Anne High School - who would've thunk that we might actually need it again?).
Decisions about things like assignment plans and most anything to do with facilities have long-term implications, and I feel it is useful to consider a variety of scenarios of how the future might look in order to make sure that we aren't potentially painting ourselves into a corner when we consider major changes.
So the concern that I am bringing up is that the new assignment plan COULD (not will, but could) result in severe overcrowding in some popular neighborhood schools. The questions to consider are:
1) How big is this risk?
2) If the risk is significant, is it important enough to try to mitigate through advance planning?
3) What should that mitigation look like?
These are the sorts of questions and issues that I hope get addressed as the details of the new enrollment system are worked out.
I guess I started the discussion of this particular topic out in a way that was a bit snarky, for which I was wrong, but this is really what I was trying to get at: because SPS is a dynamic system, making changes is going to cause secondary effects, not all of which people are anticipating and some of which will actually be perverse to the original intent of the changes. The more we can anticipate these unintended consequences, the more we are likely to successfully create positive changes, rather than just finding ourselves in a different mess than the one we were in previously.
Guaranteeing access to a neighborhood school also guarantees an increase in VARIATION in class size. That is a statistical fact. (If you want to argue with me, please come armed with at least a 300 level statistics course.) Don't pick on Roy Smith's arguments if you aren't willing to talk math.
Fixing reference areas in the NE combined with a growing school age population virtually guarantees an increase in class size and the use of portables in the near future--as I read it, Roy is just saying: don't act shocked and amazed when that happens.
former econometrics teacher
I don't think the issue was with the statistics that Roy was pointing out, as he is probably right about the numbers, and his predictions. I think the issue was in the degrading way that he said it. Labeling families who would like to send their kids to their local school, as "entitled". And, adding that if they think they can get their neighborhood school they better not feel "entitled" to uncrowded schools. Maybe I'm just way off base, but the tought of arguing over getting the very basics like your neighborhood school, reasonable bus commute, and reasonable class size is just asking the impossible. It just seems like that is the minimum that a school district should offer you. I just don't buy into the "etitlement", "elitist" stereotype for wanting basic services for your kid. For not happily accepting two hour bus commutes, or 35 kids in a class, or shipping you kid out of your neighborhood to a school that is not as good as the one in your neighborhood. I just don't get it? I'm not from Seattle and maybe this just isn't the Seattle way. I grew up in Texas, where we went to the school in our neighborhood, with all of our freinds, and loved it. We had to walk to central corners in our neighborhood where 15-20 kids met up. The bus made much fewer stops this way. We didn't share buses with other schools or snake through 6 neighborhoods. We made 6 or 7 stops heading in the direction of the school, and got their in under 15 minutes. I just don't get the Seattle way. Maybe it is just me. Maybe I am an idealist, but I am not elitist.
Granted - for this thread re capacity and potential crowding in the NE - the planning capacity of AS#1 is something like 282 and wouldn't add a whole lot to the mix even if it were "reclustered" to the NE (it's right on the line between N and NE) and made available as a reference school, and it's not a jewel of a building either in looks or in condition - but it does have a lot size of 3.2 acres and the district does own it and it could house far more of the NE demand than it currently does.
Also related to 'entitlement' vis a vis AS#1 or any alternative school (and not the fault of families who choose them but something that should could probably be 'owned' by them) is the transportation cost of bringing kids from hither and yon - all-city for AS#1.
AS#1's vigorous resistance to the district's proposal of co-location with Summit - without alternative proposals that acknowledges its relative overuse of resources in a highly resource-constrained system (both bldg capacity and transportation resources) seem to me problematic for Roy Smith's assertions about NE parent 'entitlement'.
NE neighborhood parents willing to send their kids to 1250 student , cost effective, Eckstein, are labeled "entitled", when we have AS1 parents who send their kids to a cost prohibitive k-8 school of 200 or so kids.
Hmmmmmmm.....
Well, uh , considering that there wasn't a high school in the Magnolia neighborhood, that there wasn't an open high school on all of Queen Anne aftet 1981, nor Wallingford, wasn't a high school that served students living downtown or in the Cascade neighborhood- I would say that anyone but a moron would think that we might actually need Queen Anne high school available for students in the Central area of the city from the Sound to I-5.
I also don't understand the resistance to co-location with Summit- I thought it was a perfect fit and would strengthen the alternative school community.
But in Seattle- a compromise means you change.
I think this word mut have conotations for other people that it does not have for me. Do any of these statements rub the wrong way:
Retirees over 67 are entitled to collect Social Security benefits.
Workers are entitled to their pay.
My children are entitled by law to a public education.
I am entitled to my emotions.
Being entitled isn't a bad thing. Feeling entitled isn't a bad thing either. It's not bad so long as you really are entitled to those things that you feel you are entitled to.
If you truly believe that you are entitled to enroll your children at a specific neighborhood school, then you shouldn't be shy about saying so and you shouldn't take offense if someone else says so.
I can tell that I'm missing something here, but I can't tell what it is.
Also, there are a number of people who have been denying elitism but I can't see where elitism was ever charged.
Are other people perceiving a direct connection between entitlements and elitism? Because I'm not seeing it.
I'm sorry for this, but I really need someone to spell these things out for me.
"I'm entitled to..." doesn't sound very different from "I am owed...", "I deserve..." - which seems to imply "I don't care what that means for anyone else or what it takes - I know what's mine".
That might not be the definition of "elitism" - but it's not far from one I found:
"The belief that certain persons or members of certain classes or groups deserve favored treatment by virtue of their perceived superiority, as in intellect, social status, or financial resources."
It would be nice if the word didn't carry the stigma it generally does in this context - but I think those days are gone.
"The Husky Promise guarantees that full tuition will be covered by grant or scholarship support if you are a low- or lower middle-income student and a Washington resident. These grants and scholarships do not have to be repaid. If you qualify for the Husky Promise you can be assured that if tuition increases, the University of Washington has you covered!"
They are starting another program (I forgot the name) where if an individual, group of individuals or a company/organization donates money for a scholarship, UW will match half the money. So if you had a group donating $50,000, UW would add $25,000...forever. They are trying to help others create more scholarships this way. I am so impressed with this guy.
At the end, he mentioned that UW was becoming an "elite" school but warned against people who would make it "elitist". It's an odd thing about these words. We have a President who created NCLB because he was worried about education and yet, he himself, will tag people as "university elites" (even as he went to Princeton).
Obviously, words have meaning.
I don't have any sense that entitlement is connected with a disaffection for others. The "I've got mine, Jack" sort of attitude that is described above.
If anyone has taken offense at my use of the word "entitled" then please re-consider. For me, the word is almost synonymous with "deserve" or "earned". It represents a right, nothing more. It has no broader meaning.
There are a number of people who clearly feel entitled to enroll their child at the school which they regard as their neighborhood school. I don't think that makes them elitists. I don't think it reflects their attitude towards their fellow citizens or their relative position in the community in any way. It is just a very strong expectation on their part.
I'm not sure that they are even wrong to feel entitled to this, as it is the general practice throughout the nation (although not exactly the practice here in Seattle).
It's going to be tough for us to communicate if people are going to assign new or idiosyncratic meanings to words.
You are right in your definition of the word, however, alot of folks use it with a very negative connotation.