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
1,303,373
And where does one see the funding allocation for laptops at Cleveland?
Garfield's enrollment projection is for 1,611 in headcount, 1517 adjusted for contact. Garfield's October (adjusted) enrollment was 1,788. March 2011 enrollment (not adjusted) was 1,784. Does anyone buy that boundary tweaking, accelerated IB and attrition will bleed off that many kids? I don't.
You'll notice that NOVA has only 8.85 FTE on the budget allocation.
Compare it to The Center School (266 students to NOVA's 305). NOVA has no teachers, no counselor, no attendance specialist, no Visual Arts Assistant.
Compare it to Rainier Beach (402 students). NOVA has no librarian, no assistant principal, no fiscal specialist, no academic intervention specialist, no data registrar specialist, and no activity coordinator.
NOVA can allocate their money pretty much as they like. They put it into teachers.
Is that $1,392,807.00 for teachers for 305 students at NOVA? $4566.00 per student?
I think that was Po3's question.
Next thing will be to allow gen ed teachers to actually grade all the kids who are taking their classes instead of pretending like the ones who require Level 4 services spend all day in their self contained classrooms and only allowing that teacher to access their files. (Presumably that will happen as ICS rolls up-but it should be happening now.)
The spending per student is equitable; NOVA just gets a lot more discretion about how they spend it. That "per student" allocation is poorly labelled. It should read something like: "money not yet committed to the FTE's shown above".
"Every Student a General Education student First!" NOT.
The WSS demonstrates that, once again, middle and high school students with special needs only count as a fraction of a kid. They can only plant one cheek on their GenEd seat.
SPED parent