design teams -- so what's happening?
Lowell parents today received an email from our principal letting us know that the design teams are busily working on various issues. One thing I found interesting was that the email indicated that according to her email,
"The teams are working on uniting the schools and actually don’t have the power to determine program issues, curricular issues, and staffing. Those issues are made at the building level in conjunction with the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) provisions. Each Building Leadership Team makes those decisions based on staff input."
I don't have strong feelings about this one way or the other, but I didn't actually know that there was a Building Leadership Team or what its role might be.
How are the design teams going for others? Anyone have information about Building Leadership Teams? (I admit freely that I am a first-grade parent and might simply be aware of SPS structures that others know well).
"The teams are working on uniting the schools and actually don’t have the power to determine program issues, curricular issues, and staffing. Those issues are made at the building level in conjunction with the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) provisions. Each Building Leadership Team makes those decisions based on staff input."
I don't have strong feelings about this one way or the other, but I didn't actually know that there was a Building Leadership Team or what its role might be.
How are the design teams going for others? Anyone have information about Building Leadership Teams? (I admit freely that I am a first-grade parent and might simply be aware of SPS structures that others know well).
Comments
buildings closed. There are two overarching goals for the work of these teams:
• Schools start the new school year ready to welcome students with the curriculum, facilities,
staffing, etc. they need to be successful.
• Staff and families are well supported throughout the transition process.
Eleven Programmatic Design Teams are being formed – one for each site directly impacted by the
proposed closures and program relocations. These include: Jane Addams K-8; Meany (SBOC and
NOVA); Washington; Hamilton; Lowell (including TT Minor); Thurgood Marshall; Leschi; Dunlap:
Hawthorne; Cooper (Pathfinder K-8) and AAA (Van Asselt).
Additional teams will support the students and staff at the programs that are discontinued (African
American Academy, Cooper, Meany, and Summit).
Design Teams will be working teams tasked with drafting a set of requirements for their facility
and/or program. These include requirements for school culture, curriculum and materials, parent
outreach and family support, instructional strategies, technology, facilities, special population
needs, nutritional services, childcare, community partners, etc.
http://www.seattleschools.org/area/capacity/faq_design_teams.pdf
So they don't have "the power to determine"; but they can draft "requirements." Since there are principals, teachers, and program representatives on the Teams, it would certainly raise questions if the determinations bore no resemblance to the requirements.
Color me confused.
Perhaps, since you are on a design team, you could share with us what the district has told you about your team's role, what areas you are supposed to address, what areas you are not to address, etc.?
So I'm a little surprised at the e-mail saying that the BLT would be involved in CBA issues. (Roosevelt has both a BLT, IC (Instructional Council) and Site Council so I may be confused on this issue. I would check with Lowell's BLT and ask.
Only struggling public schools resort to uniforms. Successful ones do not. To impose a uniform requirement is to declare your school a struggling school. The only elementary school north of downtown with uniforms is Northgate.
This is great. North of downtown they get advanced learning. South of downtown we get uniforms.
There are a few less traditional schools that dont have a uniform but that's probably only a handful in each country...
Parents there like uniforms - they are considered a great leveller - a uniform closes the visual gap between the haves and have nots, is cheaper on family budgets, slows some of teens' rampage into consumerism and merchandising and cuts down on child-parent and peer pressure to have and to wear the latest, most expensive and most outlandish and encourages a higher level of good behaviour when the kids are out in public before and after school - the uniforms provide an identifier and there's an implication involved relating to personal and school pride, as well as not being able to hide poor behaviour as readily...
As to cost - most schools have a uniform recycling centre where parents receive credit for items they bring in and buy other items they need.... and there are subsidies or no costs for families who would be economically disadvantaged by having to purchase uniforms...
I dont know if its still the case, but in New Zealand when I was raising my first family, all families received a monthly child benefit payment which was intended specifically to help with food and clothing costs - school uniforms in particular...
Anyway...
It would make SOME tiny bit of sense to require uniforms at Thurgood Marshall, where there's a history of them. But to make Lowell/former T.T. Minor kids wear them just so as to go along with what Marshall did??? That really makes no sense at all.
Helen Schinske
(1) When my daughter went to TT Minor during the 2007-2008 school year, TT Minor had uniforms. Maybe they did away with them this year, but if not Marshall and Lowell are in the same boat in terms of merging a uniform and a non-uniform program.
(2) Everyone knows that Seattle has a two-tier system of elementary schools, particularly in the Central Cluster. It is startling to me that smart, seemingly progressive people maintain a uniform policy that so clearly marks for the outside world which tier a school belongs to.
(3)It also shocks me how far we have slid over the last thirty or forty years with regard to valuing individuality and self-expression. Back in the 1970s, there was a fairly strong consensus among parents and educators against uniforms and many scholars and lawyers thought public school uniforms actually violated the First Amendment to the US Constitution. Fast forward to the early 1990s and both political parties endorse uniforms with a nary a peep about the degree to which such policies stiffle free expression, creativity, individuality, etc. My child is neither an interchangable cog in a government machine nor a supplicant who must check her individuality at the door to obtain the public education that is her right.
Helen Schinske
Uniforms are common in many many countries in the world and increasingly popular here in the state. Maybe it's worth reexamining how we feel about it?