Here's the agenda for tonight's Board meeting. I note that people can no longer sign up to speak at a Board meeting by phone. It is strictly by online sign-up. Not good. Public Testimony seems to cover two topics. Apparently, the Chinese program at West Seattle High School is in jeopardy and there are several speakers for that issue. The other issue is, of course, school closures. There are six people on the waitlist. Here's the latest from the Times which says that " Seattle Could Close about a quarter of its elementary schools." First, that would be a heck of a lot of schools (17) and two, only elementaries? My cynical side is that the district is throwing out a big number so they can "generously" only close 10-12. The article claims that the district is taking "$32M from its reserves" which is not true; they have no reserves. I think the reporter means capital reserves. I'll be tuning in with updates. 4:15 pm and has the 4:15
Comments
Question: What is the price tag and where is the money coming from?
Jane Adams K-8. Not one word in the update about Spectrum and when you look at the list of needed items, cirriculum mainly you see NOTHING inovative. Generic and boring if you ask me.
The Hamilton update seems to be the most thoughtful, of the three I looked at anyway.
I agree- why exactly is putting money into this, worth closing a well established school community?
Additionally- I see that while families are looking elsewhere in the district- the reason many of them were at Summit was because that program was not available elsewhere in public school.
Closing the school, is not going to make other programs more attractive to those families.
Its unfortunate- but as a former private school parent, I can understand completely.
Only one chance for your child to get a K-12 education.
I hope I will get some answers at the open house this Thursday, but honestly, I'm just not that optimistic.
I will post here after the open house and give an update.
As for the middle school it looks like they have allotted 10 classrooms for the entire middle school. Does this mean that the middle school will be smaller than the elementary IE the chimney VS mushroom model?
If you do the math it appears that there will be about 28 classrooms allotted for k-6 and only 10 classrooms for grades 6-8 (there might be some factors in that I'm not considering such as special ed, or others)
Also I noticed that they propose using the EDM for 6th grade math, instead of CMP2? Does anyone know why they would use the elementary math model for 6th grade instead of moving into cmp2 like other middle schools?