Cooper will have its day in Court
The appeal of the School Board decision to close Cooper will be heard on Friday, June 12 at 10:30 in King County Superior Court. The plaintiffs are asking for a summary judgement against the District and they really should get it.
For more detailed information, please see the West Seattle Blog complete with links to the Court filings.
For some history, here are some related posts from our archive.
Cooper fights on
Bomb Recipe
For more detailed information, please see the West Seattle Blog complete with links to the Court filings.
For some history, here are some related posts from our archive.
Cooper fights on
Bomb Recipe
Comments
Does anyone know where the Cooper kids have ended up? Weren't they scattered in all directions by the District, with little to no transportation?
And is it true that all the Cooper teachers have been laid off?
“On June 8 … other schools get to ‘pick’ through our library and put their choices on temporary bookshelves to be shrink wrapped and held. Our children will be able to see the books, but cannot use them. Why can’t they wait until the end of the school year so the children aren’t subjected to any more unnecessary stress?”
If they win, then the District will have to bring a new motion to close Cooper (and AAA, Meany, and Summit), they will have to issue public notices of their intent, they will have to conduct research and produce impact statements, and they will have to hold public hearings. Then they will have to vote again to close the schools again. If they get started right away they will easily have time for all of this before the first day of school. If, however, they contest the ruling or in any way extend the judicial process they may not have time before school starts. That would be an awful mess.
It may be in the District's best interests to capitulate - to quit their defense - and move on with the replay of the closure rather than risk having it run up against the coming school year.
Yes, they have been treated very badly, and it's perfectly reasonable to say that SPS dramatically violated the spirit of the law governing school closures, but SPS appears to have complied with the letter of the law.
The main point of contention appears to be that Cooper didn't get a closure hearing for their school. The problem with that argument is that the RCW, so far as I can tell, doesn't adequately define what is a school - is it the building, or is it the community inside the building? This oversight is perfectly reasonable since for most school districts in the state, programs and buildings are usually synonomous - you don't close one without by default closing the other.
SPS maintains that the school is the building, and what is inside the school is a program. This interpretation may be supported by RCW 28A.150.020 which reads: "Common schools" means schools maintained at public expense in each school district and carrying on a program from kindergarten through the twelfth grade or any part thereof including vocational educational courses otherwise permitted by law. The wording in this section appears to support the notion that the school is the building and the people in the school are the program. SPS maintains that since the building is not being closed, and the school by definition is the building, no closure hearing was required for Cooper because the school is not being closed.
1. Pathfinder is not an all city draw.
2. Some history was not added, during the original closures stuff (pre-2008) Cooper was slated to be closed and Pathfinder move into their building. The 2008 idea was not an original recommendation.
3. AH, a lush green rolling landscape?
4. “Other interesting things we discovered about Pathfinder” At NO time has Pathfinder ever made a play to take over Cooper’s building, all the mentioned incidents were district recommendations, not a ploy by Pathfinder to take over Cooper. When the district recommended merging the two programs, they rallied together and convinced the district to reconsider.
5. Hearsay “Hearsay is information gathered by Person A from Person B concerning some event, condition, or thing of which Person A had no direct experience (”he said she said”).” That Pathfinder didn’t want to move into “that neighborhood” is a big accusation and potentially offensive to a whole school community. This sounds like you just dislike (find them to be racist, socio-economically biased and out to get Cooper) Pathfinder. Like you are doing now, it sounds like they have been standing up for their school community.
6. After extensively looking at Pathfinders website and district school info, nowhere does it say ““Native American
Philosophy and approach to learning”. There web site does state “Native American cultures are the foundation from which we teach about many cultures, providing opportunities for our students to make their own cultural connections” Very different from your assertion.
7. Where did the information about Pathfinder “allowing” the autism program to stay. Do you know that they didn’t want it or is this also hearsay?
8. All schools slated to move or close are riddled with boxes, not just Cooper. Most Libraries close a week to two weeks before the end of the school year to collect over due books and do an inventory.
9. The district has allowed the Pathfinder community into the building twice. Once as an open house (many potential new families attended as it was school tour session) and once as a staff only inventory session.
10. Hasn’t the Pathfinder community asked the district to ADD a 6-8 Autism program?
11. Doesn’t Pathfinder also have a FREE kindergarten program?
Some have been hired and some have not. Thus some will need to be placed if they are not hired by other schools.
Just another botched happening under MG-J's direction. Maybe those from Cooper yet to be hired elsewhere can be placed at Sand Point and prepare for Jane Adams semi-closure ... with elementary to Sand Point and JA middle school expansion. {Oh I forgot that is only a rumor (I am so confused)}
Love to see a court victory for Cooper.
Better yet for Jane Adams make it an alternative school, where the alternative is academic content. Then watch it fill up.
The example that Roy cited as supporting the idea that "school" references a structure rather than an institution strikes me as suggesting just the opposite. It is, at best, ambiguous. There are plenty of examples in the State Law in which it is clear that the school is the program and NOT the building. In fact, there are plenty in which it is unambiguously clear.
Again, I think that the smart thing for the District to do is admit they were wrong and quickly - in the time available before school starts in the fall - re-do the closure work correctly. The District can afford to be wrong. They cannot afford a protracted process.
Can you provide examples from state law of unambiguousness on whether a school is the building or the program?
I spent some time skimming through RCW 28A, and the major presumption seems to be that school=building+program. In most school districts this is the case, and only rarely (outside of Seattle) does anybody propose doing separate things with the building and the program. For example, the Edmonds School District is closing Woodway Elementary school after this year - both the building and the program are going away at the same time, so there is no need to parse whether the building or the program is really the "school". For the most part, only Seattle plays musical chairs with programs and buildings.
The question, which is not clearly answered for me by the RCW, is what happens when programs are moved from one building to another. Which is the "school" then?
The term "Pathfinder at Genessee Hill" pretty much says it all. Pathfinder is a school not a building.
It will be Pathfinder at Cooper, I suppose.
The Cooper school closed but not the building.
There has been no provision for the teachers to follow their students. I guess that's the first broken promise.
As for the students, we got into Lafayette. A few of her classmates are enrolled there too. They added a Kindergarten and 1st grade section and pushed some of the older students into portables. Some kids are going to the schools in the WS South cluster where they were assigned. There is transportation for those students assigned to Arbor Heights, Highland Park and Gatewood. A handfull were assigned to Pathfinder (most of them opted-out).
I'd love to see a reverse scatter chart that documents were Cooper kids end-up.
Where did the incoming kindergartners from the former Cooper reference area go? They merged the Cooper reference area into Sanislo in WS South which already had a reference area population that exceeded their functional capacity by 135 students. K-sections were added at Schmitz Park and Lafayette, but there would be no transportation to the WS North schools. As far as I know, all the Kindergartens in West Seattle were maxed out at 28 students last year. It sounds like there are even more enrolling this year.
Dan is correct. The school board has been referring to "Pathfinder at Cooper"
First are the School Improvement Plans, which are required by law. When ORCA moved to Whitworth, the District stopped writing a plan for Whitworth but continued to write a plan for ORCA. The historical information in the plan was ORCA's historical information from when the school was housed at Columbia. Clearly the Whitworth school was closed and the ORCA school continued.
Likewise, the school accountability reports for ORCA at Whitworth have ORCA's historical data, not Whitworth's. Whitworth was clearly the school that closed. Van Asselt will not open at the AAA in Step 5 of NCLB sanctions. The school that was in Step 5, the AAA, was closed and Van Asselt at AAA is another school entirely. Well, if the AAA is a school that closed, then when did it get a public hearing? It didn't.
There are also places in state law, in section 28A, in which the law specifically refers to a "school building". The law clearly distinguishes between the school and the building.
She is confident of victory. Her first argument - which is available in the brief she filed with the Court - is that it doesn't matter what "school" means in other state laws, what matters is what "school" means in THIS state law. The legislative history of the law clearly refers to "school facilities", even if that terminology didn't appear in the final statute. The history of the law is rooted in the need for SEPA review when school buildings are opened and a complementary review when schools are closed. The language of the law may be vague, but the history of the law is clear.
She also intends to argue that the purpose of the law is for the public to have notice and to have opportunity to be heard. All three plaintiffs gave testimony at the hearing for Genessee Hill so they clearly did get notice and they were heard. She says that they also met with Director Sundquist at Cooper and had a chance to speak with him. This would fulfill the legal requirement that people get to give testimony to a Board member.
I don't think she'll need the "they gave their testimony" argument if the Court accepts her definition of "school" argument.
In the end, the whole case comes down to the definition of "school" and I think she is right that it doesn't matter what "school" means in any other law; it only matters what it means in this law. And the meaning of "school" in this law, taken from the legislative history, is "school facility" - the building, not the institution.
Ah, well, I reckoned that the effort was futile.
Some of us signed as plaintiffs on the other suits will be making similar arguments as to the meaning of a school being the programme in the building and also about the closure process being legally faulty...
I believe Charlie, in his two posts, is describing two scenarios:
1) district uses "school" and "program" in different ways to different ends: a "school" was closed when AAA was closed and VA moved into that "school" building.
2) in THIS law, it seems that the law refers to the BUILDING, so since the building wasn't closed, the rules regarding public hearing don't apply.
So while the District may use "school" and "program" ("programme," for you kiwis) in a variety of ways, in this instance it doesn't matter as buildings weren't closed.
WV is chooking up over this overly-flexible language, and a law that doesn't seem to address the needs of the community when school programs are closed....
It quotes state legislation that defines a school as the students, teachers, community as a learning institution, that a school is not just a building....
It dwells heavily on the District's change to policy wording to enable it to close schools, changing the statute-aligned wording and replacing it with the word building...
the motion's contention is that this was done to get around the need for public engagement, notification, hearings etc....