Update 2: So I have seen a message from President Liza Rankin on why she, Director Evan Briggs, and Director Michelle Sarju backed out of this meeting. In a nutshell: - She says there was no organization to the meeting which is just not true. They had a moderator lined up and naturally the board members could have set parameters for what to discuss, length of meeting, etc. All that was fleshed out. - She also claimed that if the meeting was PTA sponsored, they needed to have liability insurance to use the school space. Hello? PTAs use school space all the time and know they have to have this insurance. - She seems to be worried about the Open Public Meetings law. Look, if she has a meeting in a school building on a non-personnel topic, it should be an open meeting. It appears that Rankin is trying, over and over, to narrow the window of access that parents have to Board members. She even says in her message - "...with decisions made in public." Hmmm - She also says that th
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.