Bell Times - Never Mind
Update:
From SPS Communications about the EIS:
This This is a state requirement for large programmatic changes within the District. Legal advised us to conduct the EIS for the bell time change as part of the feasibility study (as they would do for any such possible change that the state could deemed impactful to the environment).
They reviewed the language, consulted our SEPA attorney and determined that this is required under the statute.
We will be speaking to this at the Task Force meeting.is a state requirement for large programmatic changes within the District. Legal advised us to conduct the EIS for the bell time change as part of the feasibility study (as they would do for any such possible change that the state could deemed impactful to the environment).
They reviewed the language, consulted our SEPA attorney and determined that this is required under the statute.
We will be speaking to this at the Task Force meeting.
I could not find the next Task Force meeting date and have asked for it. The meeting is today.
I don't even need to say anything. The newest from the District:
- Flip Herndon says that this will have "a significant adverse effect on the environment"
From SPS Communications about the EIS:
This This is a state requirement for large programmatic changes within the District. Legal advised us to conduct the EIS for the bell time change as part of the feasibility study (as they would do for any such possible change that the state could deemed impactful to the environment).
They reviewed the language, consulted our SEPA attorney and determined that this is required under the statute.
We will be speaking to this at the Task Force meeting.is a state requirement for large programmatic changes within the District. Legal advised us to conduct the EIS for the bell time change as part of the feasibility study (as they would do for any such possible change that the state could deemed impactful to the environment).
They reviewed the language, consulted our SEPA attorney and determined that this is required under the statute.
We will be speaking to this at the Task Force meeting.
I don't even need to say anything. The newest from the District:
As part of the Bell Time Feasibility Study being undertaken by Seattle Public Schools, an Environmental Impact Study (EIS) will be conducted using the three options presented to the community for feedback (see options here). In preparation for the EIS, there will be a scoping meeting for this project on Thursday, June 25, 2015, from 6:00-7:30 p.m. at Seattle Public Schools, Stanford Center Auditorium, 2445 3rd Avenue S., Seattle, WA 98124.
Additionally, comments on the alternatives, mitigation measures, probable adverse impacts and licenses or permits that may be required may be submitted not later than July 6, 2015 by mail or by email. For more information on how to provide comments and the scoping meeting, please visit this site.
From "This site":
- They want an EIS that will consider transportation, air quality, noise, light and glare, recreation and public services and utilities.
My question? Are we talking about lighting a football field or changing bus times? What noise? What light and glare? I see some real reaching here.
There's a meeting on June 25th, send comment, blah, blah.
Don't waste your energy. They aren't going to do it. They were never going to do it. They were just shining the Board and everyone else on.
Oh, and by the way, the district wants to move money from Capital to General Fund. From the Audit and Finance Committee Agenda
I move the adoption of Resolution 2014/2015-32 authorizing an Interfund loan from the Capital
Projects Fund to the General Fund in the amount of $ million.
Now ostensibly this is about the Legislature not having a budget so the District (and other state-funded entities) can work in July and August.
First, I don't think the Legislature is NOT going to come thru with a budget. I haven't heard any other person/media source say this.
Second, you'll note that statement above does NOT include:
- in the case of lack of funding from the Legislature,
- doesn't have a time period and
- doesn't have a sum of money (when we know the District KNOWS how much it costs to run itself especially in the slow-down times of July and August).
There are some people in leadership in this district who need to be checked.
Comments
We need a board that will crack down hard on senior staff for pulling stunts like this. It's unacceptable and jobs ought to be on the line over this. Insubordination by the staff to board directives is unacceptable and should be a fireable offense.
JSCEE scheduling | Parking for meetings
Please be mindful when scheduling meetings at the JSCEE. Due to the current staff increase parking is at a premium. We have over 800 staff in the building and fewer than 300 general parking spaces. Large meetings, especially ones that start before 8 a.m. or end after 3 p.m. significantly impact daily operations of departments.
Evidence that once again we're feeding the JSCEE central staff bureaucracy mirmac1 notes because "due to the current staff increase parking is at a premium". Hope about hire more counselors, instructional assistants, truancy specialists and teachers who actually work in the schools with students - easy way to minimize the JSC Palace parking issues.
JR
- Charade
This is before we get to the EIS. They threw down a friggin EIS? Helluva effort downtown bureaucrats. Helluva effort.
DistrictWatcher
The giant sink hole sounds good to me.
Step 2) The Board tells Nyland quietly behind closed doors that the person responsible needs to be fired or Nyland loses his contract.
Does this seem extreme? Maybe, but this is feeling like the insubordination right after the MIF adoption vote. Insubordination cannot be tolerated under any circumstances, even bad press. Insubordination must be cut off at the knees, and quickly.
I started getting a bad feeling about this over the past couple weeks, but this is unbelievable.
Sorry pro-sleep mom, I know you've worked really hard on this.
I went to "community meetings" where the district told the parents that all their ideas for alternatives for the district's awful ideas were impossible. Parents and PTA would ask the district questions that were never answered. The board asks questions all the time that are never answered by district officials. Why the board doesn't write these questions down and ask direct questions about the answer at the next board meeting is beyond me.
This district has been like this for the 10 years my kids have been in the system. The district views the board and the parents as a necessary evil that they must deal with, but they have no interest in taking either seriously. And really, why would they? Nothing happens if they don't and they get to do whatever they want.
I would never volunteer for any committee and I don't bother with surveys anymore. The district throws all of those things immediately in the proverbial round file.
Leadership must be changed as this attitude towards the board and staff is inexcusable. I have no faith things will change.
-roti
-roti.
This is a good idea, but I don't think Nyland would care. That would be a termination without cause, so he gets to collect severance. A year's pay or more? He's already said he's planning on leaving in a couple of years anyway and if the District pays him for nothing, it's no skin off his nose.
Contracts like this are at the heart of the problem.
For the win
Nolo contendre reductio ad absurdum, said District will, ad astra, convene a task force tasked forcefully with determining which, if any, publicly educationally relevant Buildings, Structures, Bus Routes and other publicated edumacation activies might, perchance, be adjacent, against or upon a City, State or Federal Shore.
Resultant injection, inspection, detection, infection, neglection and selection of data-driven data will be displayed artfully and tastefully in the JSCEE lobby, on twenty seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one is to be used as evidence against taking action. Pictures of the approachs, the getaways, the northwest corners, the southwest corners, and that's not to mention the aerial photography.
To apply for a one-year term on this Shoreline Management of Schools Task Force, apply to JSCEE Employee 745, who is located in the cubie 233A, on the second floor, past the water fountain, down the hall, through the door marked "Rabbit Hole", seven cubies east, four south.
-HS Parent
SEA did a survey of teachers- later starts for high school had 87% in favor; earlier for elementary 75% in favor.
We have the preliminary results from the survey; of 12,098 participants (10,525 parents) nearly 65% favored or strongly favored the Modified Flip (27.8% opposed); 40% favored Ext HS day (31 opposed) and 29% favored no change (50.6% opposed). You can see more detailed results if you look at the June 2nd presentations, pages 30-33 here: http://sps.ss8.sharpschool.com/cms/One.aspx?portalId=627&pageId=203665 Note that the numbers don't total to 100 since you could prefer or oppose one or more options.
Numerous groups have endorsed this, including Seattle NAACP and El Centro de la Raza and, most recently, the Seattle Urban League.
Finally, if we put some energy and money into improving our transportation system, we could have options that are good for kids and actually save money by reducing the number of buses (Modified Flip will do this! even if K8s are in Tier 2, where they should be, this would SAVE MONEY)- and then we could skip the EIS, right?
The glaring fact that Hale has a late start and seems to work out just fine and dandy continues to be ignored.
No option to just move MS/HS start/end by 20 minutes to 8:10-2:35 has ever been considered.
And why does the district not want to move bell times? Is is too much work for them? At this point it seems like they are putting in a lot of effort not to change bell times.
In this option, high schools would run periods 1 - 7 schedule, and support student choice. High school students could choose to either attend periods 1 through 6 starting at 7:50 A.M. and ending at 2:20 P.M., or attend periods 2 through 7, starting class later at 8:40 am and ending the day at 3:10 pm
Would students *really* have a choice, or would it depend what classes you took? I can envision that certain classes would only be offered at period 1, for example, to facilitate master schedules and to ensure that *some* number of students is staggered throughout the day, particularly in high schools that are at/near/over capacity.
Does this option really allow for 100% of students to *choose* the delayed start time? Have they laid out any details? Surely they must have considered the details since they have a cost estimate associated with this option.
Yes, Hale and Sealth do fine with their 8:40 start.
Why is 8:10 not being considered? Three reasons-
1) American Academy of Pediatrics (and many other organizations) endorse MS/HS start times of 8:30 or later; that is the time frame the task force has been focusing on.
2) We have to have two or three tiers of busing, and 8:10 would put Tier 2 at 9am and Tier3 at 9:50- which is really way way too late for anyone.
3) to align with kids biological shifts in sleep/wake patterns, elementary should be earlier and MS/HS later. This also eliminates the 30 minute tier in the afternoon (HS out at 2:10; Elem out at 2:50) which currently costs us several million in buses.
I have yet to understand why the staff opposes this- it's the 20 million dollar question. The main reason seems to be too much work- yet they are creating a lot of work opposing it. I would think Flip has plenty to do managing capacity without adding this EIS to his workload.
They want to focus on the 1080 hour issue and the 24 credit issue- but all the options they put out, don't address either of those, which are really discreet problems from the bell time issue.
I agree with another comment that if the district isn't going to change anything, why waste the money on an EIS.
Here is the FAQ on the Extended HS day: http://sps.ss8.sharpschool.com/common/pages/DisplayFile.aspx?itemId=140260
It seems to be written to say as little as possible- an English teacher would have a hayday with it.
It was like pulling teeth to get this out of them, and there are certainly lots of unanswered questions yet.
But, they do say absolutely that they would run buses for both HS start and end times; this adds 83 buses to our current schedule, hence the $6 million price tag. For this hefty sum, you get only a precious few kids in their optimal time- only the HS students who choose it, and as you note, have classes they need offered at the time they want to choose. Middle school is still too early, and elementary is still too late.
There are many other costs and issues with this option- what is the cost of having the building open an extra hour? Would key staff have to be there all seven periods (principal, librarian, nurse, janitor?) and what would that cost? Would staff get to pick their schedule too? and then you need the CBA amended to deal with that. And on and on...
I, too, want to know more about the 800 staff members and what they actually do.
It's been clear to me this year that they don't want to change the bell times. After attending a Bell Times meeting run by someone from an outside company who didn't know how to run a meeting and being told that we were to complete an in-person survey as well as the on-line survey (which were basically the same) and being shown a video that we could only watch in sections while filling out the survey according to their prompts, I realized that all they were doing was engaging in stall tactics. Bore everyone to death with surveys and meetings and now an EIS and hopefully the issue will go away. What this all reminds me of is the old "Almost Live" skit about the "Ineffectual Middle Management Suck-Ups." Spend the day holding tons of meetings and call it "work," get nothing of note done, go home, only to do it again the next day.
North End Parent
Signed
K-8 no
Perhaps, but are we 100% sure this would be without cause? What if the investigative powers found that the request for the EIS came from Nyland himself? Surely that might be considered with cause, no? It's really hard to know how things play out in a legal battle, but frankly he would come out looking so ugly if it were true, I'm not sure how hard people would have to push to get him out the door. This is all wild speculation, of course. But what's not speculation is that this feels like insubordination.
A critical question that needs to be answered is: who requested the EIS? The city? The state? Or was it something that was initiated by someone at SPS? If the latter, then I absolutely think there would be causal grounds for firing and/or contract termination. Why? Because it's like asking the IRS to audit your company for no reason. It's sabotaging your own goals. Or in this case, sabotaging the Board and the public's goals.
I'm quite sure the answer to this question is not something we can trust that will be given freely, it will necessarily need to be dug out via PRR.
Another critical question that no one seems to have the answer to, is simply: WHY?! Why is staff opposed to something like this that makes perfect sense, and is overwhelmingly preferred by parents, teachers and students? What on earth is the problem?!
Seen It
Westside
-sleeper
We all want what you have so all our children benefit from the late start, not just students attending a couple of high schools.
If Sealth and Hale can have the late start, why can't RHS, GHS, BHS etc. have a late start? What's the roadblock to changing the HS times?
I am wondering if there is pushback from the elementary schools' staff and faculty about a bell times changes. I wonder if they might not be keen on having their work day start earlier after years at a later start. Then again, that may be just my particular bias--I am not an earlybird!
North End Parent
Many schools already start at 9:30, including my daughter's elementary, and yes its late.
I'd love a switch to an earlier slot for elementary students!
The roadblock to changing high school times is cost. Our current schedule allows most buses to make a drop before 7:50 and then drive another am route to a second or third tier school. If we moved all the high schools later, we'd have to pay our transportation vendor another $50 to $60K for each additional bus we'd need. That's a lot of money.
At the Task Force meeting today, they said the EIS was standard for any large change. It was indeed on our timeline from the beginning; originally scheduled in October 2014, but legal advised them to wait to do it until after community meetings.
The list of options is general and we are not locked into these three; they are a range for the EIS and can be modified. The EIS should be done by early to mid-October 2015, depending on the comments that are received.
The Task Force voted on which of the three options presented to the community to recommend- and while there are members who did not make it there today and will be submitting later- the vote so far is unanimous for Modified Flip. I think there will be several minority reports for Two Tiers, and for Modified Flip with K-8s in Tier 2- I know I'll be writing one of those.
-Need sleep
reader47
So is giving them a later start costing more money or is it just the addition of ALL the high schools?
The numbers are really, really contradictory - and there are lots of numbers. Which makes them all rather suspect.
I'd love to see an outside prof'l entity (NOT a consultant, but an actual logistics entity that has skill in this particular type of field) - first audit and then design the system.
I think the SPS bus route people have, like most of the other depts. with good people and good intentions, lost their way in the thicket of contradictory higher directives, bad management, low morale, keep-your-head-down trenches. I suspect that there are vast improvements that could be made, but that the people who are living the dept every day can't make them b/c of the usual problems.
It's not rocket science - it's route planning. Military people do this every freaking day. Truck logistics people do this every day. Our nation moves how many people and how much freight to where? How often? It's doable, but the bell times and planning needs to be done in conjunction with the bus route standards - and those standards need to fit different parts of the city differently, not one size fits all -
But that would take will.
Signed: bus lover
What if we had schools share buses again?
What if we took that a step further and had MS and HS share buses. Roosevelt/Eckstein, Ballard/Whitman, Meany/(when reopened)GHS?
Do we really need every school to start at the same time? Couldn't we first look at pairing schools up and set those bell times calling that Tier 1 and then look at stand-alone schools making them Tier 2?
If we have to choose the best way to use our transportation dollars, which is more valuable - later secondary school start times or region-wide transportation to option schools? If we're looking for other ways to cut costs to make this work, I suggest not approving the Superintendent's start of school project and using that money for transportation. If the professionals we already employ can't figure out how to make the enrollment/hiring/transportation process work, why not replace them rather than pay consultants to train them?
Sure it would. Drop MS off at 8:45 or a 9am start, HS off at 9 for a 9:15 start, for example.
Just need to compromise a bit on "late" start time.
Oops - I didn't understand your suggestion. That does make sense!
intheknow
(Oh, why am I not surprised.).
There are maybe 20 people at JBLM and Camp Murray alone who could whip this ... and they're not crazy high paid consultants. There are reserve units in the area that are all transportation-focused - this is what their officers and senior enlisted specialize in, both in the military and often in civilian life, because ... transferable skills! And then there's industry - Why does SPS not recruit from the world's best logistics agency ever, the US Military, for Transpo? It's a no brainer.
And the cynic in me notes that a lot of the bus cost statistics are skewed by including the cost and number of buses from the old choice assignment plan, and from the students who were still being bused in smaller numbers to schools under the choice plan. The last group of kids who were assigned or chose schools under that plan are leaving 5th grade this year - now elem. is in pure neighborhood availability mode, or option schools. So using say the last 5 years of data is skewed b/c those numbers reflect buses that just shouldn't be going in the future, b/c kids don't get an involuntary assignment to a farther school, like they used to under choice.
signed: bus lover
intheknow
-- Supporter of Two Tiers