Apparently a Cheerful LIttle Earful
From our friends over at West Seattle Blog, a review of the coffee chat last night with Dr. Goodloe-Johnson.
The number of community members who attended was almost matched by the number of district staffers on hand, but those who came brought up some challenging issues – primarily class size and closed schools.
Here's a great line:
Most of the discussion centered on elementary-level class sizes; if classes hold 28 or more, Dr. Goodloe-Johnson said, it’s up to the school’s principal to work with teachers and find solutions.
So get busy principals.
Anyone attend?
The number of community members who attended was almost matched by the number of district staffers on hand, but those who came brought up some challenging issues – primarily class size and closed schools.
Here's a great line:
Most of the discussion centered on elementary-level class sizes; if classes hold 28 or more, Dr. Goodloe-Johnson said, it’s up to the school’s principal to work with teachers and find solutions.
So get busy principals.
Anyone attend?
Comments
I believe that if the wider public realized how poorly SPS has managed the dollars they have graciously donated to our schools via levy support, and that, after hundreds of millions of dollars invested, kids are still sitting in portables - more than ever before, people would be outraged.
I can't believe MGJ's response wherein she punts to the school's principal & staff to make lemonade out of the lemons she dumped on them.
Is there a better example of an utterly incompetent, unaccountable SI anywhere in the country right now? Holy cow! How low can the bar go?
The question came up about elementary classroom limits as per the SEA contract. MJG said she "didn't know for sure", and the new area rep gave only partial answer of "28 per class".
Actually, that's for the 4-5 classes only, with 26:1 in K-3 (as SPS-wide average goals). How could they not know this, with these overcrowding issues brought to their attention daily? There were families with 32 second graders at the meeting, and there are no solutions being offered to ease that problem for the kids in the class (extra pay makes sense for the teacher, but does nothing for the kids crowded in the classroom).
http://www.seattlewea.org/static_content/
certcontract2010.pdf
I think it's time to push the district to re-open Fairmount Park. There are currently 262 kids in the Madison area elementary area over the functional capacity, enough to comfortably start up a school. Look at how many new elementary schools have opened up in the northend with fewer than 100 kids each!
Fairmount Park sits between the most overcrowded schools of Gatewood and Schmitz Park, and could also take Alki kids from that ridiculous south end leg, who would be much closer to FP. Kids from the ex-Cooper area could also be given the chance to go to a school closer to their home, rather than their over crowed Layfayette assignment.
It would also give the opportunity for the maps to be redrawn to where they should have been in the first place, and an opportunity to actually fill the northend secondary schools to match their functional capacity, instead of a 46% imbalance (kids in Denny/Sealth vs Madison/WSHS areas with both sets of schools basically the same functional capacity).
This is a situation which absolutely is not acceptable, and which could have been avoided. It's time to step up and make it right.
I do have to think that even with all her eduspeak spewing, MGJ knows how badly it is going for her at this point.
Her staff must have been mortified by the end of the evening.
Pathfinder doesn’t need any (yet) portables over at the new building they are actually filling the previously unfilled building. At Fairmont Park they would need lots of portables, seems like if they need to open a new school it could be the small "cooper school" in the Fairmont park building.
Right now, K-3 teachers get more money when the class size hits 28 kids. For grade 4/5, extra pay hits at 32 kids.
The proposal says over the next 3 years, K-3 overage pay will happen when class size is 28-27-27 (so that means one more year with 28 as the trigger, then it goes down).
For grade 4/5, the triggers over the next 3 years are 31-30-29 per class.
http://www.seattleschools.org/area/laborrelations/20100901_TA_Summary.pdf
I am very sorry that Cooper was closed and did not at all think that it was the right thing to do. But are you wanting the Fairmount Park community to never have a neighborhood school again (if the numbers warrant it reopening), just because Cooper was closed? I do not understand how you would not want those kids to at least be able to once again go to a walkable neighborhood school like they used to. Remember, all the Fairmount Park kids were uprooted also.
This is EXACTLY the kind of ripple effect that happens. It's not just "oh so who cares which building gets renovated". When South Shore, a school in sad but not horrifically poor condition, only a '70s building, got rebuilt and not Pathfinder in a bad building with its entire middle school out in portables didn't, you have to wonder.
Pathfinder not being rebuilt but needing a better space triggered the district to do something. Cooper, in a fairly isolated area, struck the district as the right building to take over. (And don't forget, this wasn't the district's first time to aim for Cooper.) So they forced out Cooper's population (and all the while the parents in neighboring schools warned that those schools would become over populated. Then the NSAP shook this up even more.
The ripple effect from one choice can go straight through a region.
And, of course, there is the disappointment that the district absolutely refused to wait on South Shore because the City had long been considering renovating the Rainier Beach CC which South Shore is attached to. Nevermind that it would have saved dollars and allowed continuity of design for these attached buildings. No, it was "Oh the City will never come around. We can't wait." What's in the Mayor's budget as one of the last Parks projects (and to which I have heard few objections from the City Council); rebuilding RBCC.
Please, going forward, keep this in mind. There IS a reason to want to have input on the buildings that get renovated under BEX IV. What is happening to West Seattle could happen in your region next.
(And just for a going-on-record statement, I believe that Viewlands and Rainier View may be being renovated in case a charter school law passes and the district will just happen! to have these spaces available.)
Thank Sundquist,it is the only thing he ever did for anyone in WS. He is the WORST thing to have ever happen to us.
BTW, the Dept. of Ed. suggested to the District that perhaps they should discontinue PF. It was already in Step 2 of failing AYP, Cooper was in no step at all. Now PF is in Step 3. Guess some children are more valuable than others.
Still waiting for the decision of the Department of Education's Compliance Review. We get upset when we feel the District has violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
This is the only and I repeat ONLY way to make West Seattle somewhat whole again. Even an eventual court ruling, if in your favor, will have limited impact on the kids that are getting stomped on.
Go get someone feisty. Get them funded. Get rid of Sundquist, who SHUDDER is poised to become President of the School Board. STOP HIM NOW. GET GOING.
I urge you, it is not too late. Word of mouth can be highly effective. Talk to your friends and neighbors about the issues and why you are voting no (assuming that you are).
Is there some "credible commitment" our community could make to ensure that those schools, if renovated, will NOT be used for charters?
(If we were in a "Game Theory 101" Economics class, we would write up a contract to say that we would burn the schools down if they were leased to a Charter. In real life that would be problematic.)
How 'bout Maria Ramirez? She should've beat Sundquist the first time.
Or, another thought is, if the KC Council seat goes to McDermott, we should recruit Diane Toledo.
Or, I'll legally change my name to "anyonebutSundquist" and run.
I'm wondering what "horrifically bad condition" is to you and how bad South Shore had to be before being rebult?
My daughter was at the old building for a year and among the problems it had were random leaks anytime it rained hard-leaks bad enough that whole areas had to be roped off and buckets set out. "Classrooms were crowded cubicles where kids had to climb over each other when all of them were trying to get around the room, and worst of all, a rug that harbored so much mold and mildew (remember those leaks) that my daughter and others with asthma experienced a huge increase in attacks. Our family alone ended up in the ER half a dozen times during the rainy season.
Add to that heat that was often either too low or too high (a problem the soon-to-be renovated Rainier Beach Community Center STILL suffers from, the heating system covered both buildings). Then there was the tiny playground that really belonged to the park system...
I know you dislike the fact the South Shore even exists, but the non-school building where it was originally housed was a threat to the health of kids like my child. I'm sure there are others like it and they should all be fixed. That doesn't mean South Shore's rebuild shouldn't have happened. If they had not begun the build and relocated to another building in the interim, we'd have had to consider changes our daughter's school placement.