Please let us know if you attend the rally before the meeting. Seeing photos from Twitter; looks like a good crowd at the rally. The West Seattle Blog is there reporting. I am going to attempt to live blog so you will see abbreviations, spelling/grammar errors, etc. I will clean it up but I think it is worth trying to do. I will be refreshing the page as I go. I am sad to see that apparently President Liza Rankin is not even going to allow 10 people over the regular 20 to testify. Just five. Also, right at the beginning, the Board has stuck in, after Board comments, a Progress Monitoring presentation. They could have put it at the end but they didn't. They think - in 45 minutes - they can do Superintendent comments, Board comments and this presentation. I doubt that public testimony will start on-time. Tone-deaf doesn't even cover it with Board leadership. To note, apparently the district scheduled the NE community meeting on closures on Rosh Hashanah which is October 2. I
Comments
I'm glad to hear they won't be moved right away.
-CT
MGJ and Enfield are gone, but Burgess continues their work.
Notice that the projected enrollment at Rainier Beach High School next year is 320? Yet that school gets all of the staff that WSS dictates. NOVA, projected to have 308, gets significantly less funding.
This is not the special funding for ELL students or for students with IEPs, or even LAP money for under-performing students. The non-traditional schools are cheated out of the basic funding that the District says every school needs just to operate.
Spending on Basic Education teaching for 320 students at Rainier Beach (pdf page 75) comes to $1,369,012.
Spending on Basic Education teaching for 308 students at NOVA (pdf page 247) comes to $1,225,786. The District provides RBHS with an additional $143,226 to teach 12 more students.
The real inequity, however, comes in the other basic spending for every school.
The only other money provided to NOVA to operate the school - not counting funding for special needs students - is $257,731. RBHS, however, gets $825,760. That's $568,000 that NOVA is denied because... well, for no reason at all.
IMHO
The word Racial was not put back in the title of the document. Sharon Peaslee and Betty Patu were the only two directors who advocated that it be put back in the document. As for Harium Martin-Morris's monologue.... all I can say is what a great disappointment. Sadly, it didn't come as a surprise. I say we send mass emails to the directors voicing our opinions.
Harium gets more and more detached. It's very odd behavior to watch.
I have sent an email to the Directors and to Bernardo Ruiz stating it is imperative that "racial" be added back to the policy's name to reflect the original intent to eliminate institutional racism in the district. Many thanks to Directors Patu and Peaslee for advocating for this.