Friday Open Thread
Reports of shots fired in the Ballard High neighborhood this morning led to a brief shelter in place at the school. SPD investigated around the area and could find nothing. I tried to find out if the shelter in place was at Salmon Bay as well but could not reach Communications for verification.
In other big news in the district:
Seattle’s music programs have won a lot of well-deserved awards, but a Grammy? It could happen.
Beth Fortune, who teaches Orchestra and Eclectic Strings at Washington Middle School is one of only 25 semi-finalists nationwide for the 2015 Grammy Music Educator Award. She was selected from 7,000 applicants.
Ten finalists will be announced in December, and the winner will be announced during Grammy week in February 2015.
The nine finalists will each receive a $1,000 honorarium, and the schools of all 10 finalists also will receive matching grants.
Google announced the winners of their Science Fair and they were three teenaged girls from Ireland.
Another teenager, Joshua Wong from Hong Kong, is leading the fight for democracy there.
Mr. Wong emerged as a figure in Hong Kong’s activist circles two years ago, when he rallied students against a government plan to introduce “patriotic education” in schools, attacking it as a means of Chinese Communist Party indoctrination.
There are no Director community meetings on Saturday.
What's on your mind?
In other big news in the district:
Seattle’s music programs have won a lot of well-deserved awards, but a Grammy? It could happen.
Beth Fortune, who teaches Orchestra and Eclectic Strings at Washington Middle School is one of only 25 semi-finalists nationwide for the 2015 Grammy Music Educator Award. She was selected from 7,000 applicants.
Ten finalists will be announced in December, and the winner will be announced during Grammy week in February 2015.
The nine finalists will each receive a $1,000 honorarium, and the schools of all 10 finalists also will receive matching grants.
Google announced the winners of their Science Fair and they were three teenaged girls from Ireland.
Another teenager, Joshua Wong from Hong Kong, is leading the fight for democracy there.
Mr. Wong emerged as a figure in Hong Kong’s activist circles two years ago, when he rallied students against a government plan to introduce “patriotic education” in schools, attacking it as a means of Chinese Communist Party indoctrination.
There are no Director community meetings on Saturday.
What's on your mind?
Comments
Are there any other October surpises out there? I sure hope not!
-Beyond Baffled
Except... it's not available on the SPS site any longer. In data & reports, the most recent year available is 2009-10. Maybe I've missed something? This is basic information that the district files every month - tossing it up on the website is pretty simple. So am I just looking in the wrong place?
You called it. Period.
Those who would be "held accountable" are long gone in this district.
Thank goodness your early warning call remains...
Too bad most school districts aren't very zealous about enforcing FERPA laws when it doesn't suit their purposes.
43% of the growth is now at high school. This is quite disproportionate. 4 grades of 13 is 30%. So if growth were "even" you would see about a 30% growth at high school, so it is clear that the growth curve is moving into the high school years and some of the elementary growth is beginning to stabilize.
Ballard, Roosevelt and Hale are all identified as have more students in the attendance area than capacity.
The enrollment reports used to be on this Data & Reports page. There were there when school started but now they are all just gone.
Even if elementary enrollment growth stabilizes, total district enrollment will continue to grow.
From 1997-98 through 2008-09, K enrollment didn't break 4,000. In 2008-09, it went over, and not only hasn't dipped under that since, but has climbed to almost 4,900. That's a big jump moving up through every grade, and it looks less and less like a bubble and more and more like a new normal.
A new normal that there isn't enough space for.
i did a quick look at the total counts. If middle school (three grade) was 50% of the elementary school enrollment, there would be 3,000 additional middle school students over and above current enrollment and if that same ratio (4 grades to 6 grades) was applied to high school, there would be an additional 4,000 students.
So yes, while the growth curve is stabilizing at elementary as those students roll up through the grades, there are likely to be some big changes at secondary.
The School Reports for each school (accessed from the online school directory) gives an enrollment count, but the most recent ones that are posted are for the 2012-13 or 2011-12 school years.
- North-end Mom
On Wed. the first of October, I was in the main office of a Seattle high school checking my snail mail before school started, and this youngster-who-looked-panicked-outta-his-shoes asked me ...
what he should do ...? where he could go ?? [in my head I'm trying to figure out what he's asking and how can I figure it without scaring him more] and I randomly asked "are you new here" or something like that and he said "yes".
"Ah ... " stalling while I do mental gymnastics, "where did you go to school before?"
"At ______, they told me yesterday to come here today."
Just them, some of the office staff regulars showed up & I gave a quick intro & 1 of the regulars said something about October 1 and the wait list moving ... someone escorted him to counseling to get a schedule.
This kid missed out on all the late summer get-the-new-9th-graders-settled-in stuff which happened over 2 weeks before Labor Day weekend.
I KNOW how to fix this idiocy!! Why don't we pass some more idiotic laws that aren't paid for! We'll flip a coin to figure out if the idiotic laws will come from the completely clueless over paid seat warmers at the Gates Foundation, or from the equally clueless seat warmers at the U.W. College of Ed!
This
DistrictSucks
They can't even keep track of what they are doing now so why give them more to mess up?
City Council is taking on Parks and now they want to create a new Department of Education AND a new citywide preschool program?
Just say no.
Reader47
Absolutely. The city is unable to manage present federal grants without significant and sustained audit findings.
Is there any way SPS could rent that building? That place could solve most or maybe even ALL of the North end's seat problems. It is larger than any building the district has! Meridian Park seems to be maintained by Parks people (there was a broken faucet one time and I called Parks & they came out to shut off the water & fixed the faucet). Anyone know if the City own the building, or does it still belong to the archdiocese?
CCA
CCA
I wonder if it would be feasible for SPS to rent from Historic Seattle. The building seems to be in good condition, and it might be better to rent than buy or build, if things change and the student population goes back down.
CCA
In the NY Times:
WA State political stand puts schools in a bind
According to Arne D in the article: The goal of teaching is students learning and this is a piece of evaluating what students are learning.
Yet WA State outperformed nearly every other state in NAEP score improvement from 2011 to 2013. So it is not about a state effectively improving student learning ... it is about WA State's refusal to obey Arne's dictates. {Note: there is little reason to believe that what Arne pushes will be effective in improving student learning because he has no use for real data.}
To improve a system requires the intelligent application of relevant data.
Here's the link. It's at the Washington Post, so no paywall is involved.
HP
Just an idea of a possible solution, is all. It is a rare existing building that is actually large enough for a secondary school in the North end that could solve SPS lack of space problems. I have no idea how feasible it is, just trying to brainstorm solutions. There were schools at the building Hazel Wolf is at now too.
Or we could just continue complaining about SPS' incompetency and fighting over Lincoln and WP, since that has been so fruitful and all.
CCA