Upcoming Board Meeting - Sept 7, 2011
The Board will hold a regular legislative meeting on September 7, 2011. Here is a link to the agenda.
No word yet on the topics for the Superintendent's Updates.
There are three Action items:
A vote on a contract with METRO for ORCA cards, mostly for students.
Introduction and action on conditional certificates for two more Teach for America corps members, Kenneth Maldonado (South Shore) and Desiree Robinette (Aki Kurose).
A Vote to adopt the newly written Series 4000 Policies. The discussion of these policies is going to have to be its own thread (see above).
There are three motions for introduction:
* BEX Hamilton Final Acceptance
* BEX Hamilton Commissioning Acceptance
* Support for the High Point's Promise Neighborhood grant application
No word yet on the topics for the Superintendent's Updates.
There are three Action items:
A vote on a contract with METRO for ORCA cards, mostly for students.
Introduction and action on conditional certificates for two more Teach for America corps members, Kenneth Maldonado (South Shore) and Desiree Robinette (Aki Kurose).
A Vote to adopt the newly written Series 4000 Policies. The discussion of these policies is going to have to be its own thread (see above).
There are three motions for introduction:
* BEX Hamilton Final Acceptance
* BEX Hamilton Commissioning Acceptance
* Support for the High Point's Promise Neighborhood grant application
Comments
a reader
At this meeting, it's mystery donor time. Time for Dr. Enfield to quit with the cloak and daggers, smoke and mirrors and 'fess up to who our mystery donor for TFA is. (My money is still on Bezos.) TFA hires have been made so now she needs to tell us. If she doesn't, well, that might be a problem.
There is also one Consent item that is very problematic. As you may recall, Chief Sealth is one of the 3 high schools not to receive a total remodel (the others are RBHS and Ingraham). When the district announced that it was doing Denny/Sealth as a joint campus and that it would be Denny to get the new building, well, Sealth was not happy to say the least.
So the district moved money around and found more money to throw at the lesser renovations for Sealth. (Sealth was built in 1957 and actually was built quite earthquake safe.) However, we all know that while visible updates are great, if the guts of the building aren't stellar, the building won't work well.
And so we come to the Consent item. It is for $375k to rehab and upgrade the existing elevators so that both Denny and Sealth can open. The Board has to approve anything over $250k.
Here's the thing; there's a Board policy that allows the district to act in an emergency when there are unforeseen circumstances beyond the District's control.
So the work has already been done and the Board is just acknowledging it by voting yes.
I absolutely get the need to update the elevators but I also think the BEX staff didn't want to add this in the beginning because they didn't want to have to put out the money at the time. (They state there is money in BEX III for this fix.) I think they crossed their fingers the elevators would last.
Do I believe this is something that "just" came up? No, I don't. And unfortunately for the district, any repairs to one elevator had to be done to all to meet current life safety codes.
It took them two months of "investigating" to figure out they couldn't continue to use the old ones. That's when the Board was around and could have actually examined this and signed off before the work was done.
It all looks a little like at Cleveland where work was done without telling the Board and then asking them for the money.
This should NOT become something that the BEX staff regularly does when they want to do something but don't want to tell the Board right away.