Concord Elementary Sends United Message to Nyland

Good afternoon, 

I'm writing to you on behalf of the community of parents, guardians, and teachers at Concord International Elementary school who together, wrote and gathered over 300 signed copies of the letter attached to this email in two days.

Our parents, teachers, and community members are asking to be included in the processes by which decisions are made that directly affect our students and families. It is essential that members of our school community be actively sought out and included in these conversations due to a unique set of circumstances and our specific demographics. Our school boasts a competitive dual language program and an incredibly competent staff of teachers. However, because our school has a disproportionate number of students of color, English Language Learners, and families at or below the federal poverty level, implementing core curriculum that is both pedagogically sound, in accordance with international education requirements, and culturally appropriate is especially challenging. In addition, because of these dynamics our school and its students stand to be more negatively impacted by inadequate funding and untimely changes to student/teacher ratio than other school communities in our district. 
At this time, our specific request is that you reconsider the staffing cuts that are taking place at our school and provide us with the information necessary to understand why our school district staff and board members are not taking action in light of the state's failure to fund our schools.  While it is the paramount duty of our state to fully fund public education, a failure to do so does not relinquish the school board of directors and our superintendent from their responsibilities. These responsibilities include establishing consistent and equitable policies, developing a balanced budget, and using their legal and fiduciary authority to ensure each child has equal access to the education they deserve without discrimination or oversight.  

Thank you for your time, we look forward to hearing from you soon. 

Casey S. Peplow

Co-President, Concord International Elementary School PTA

Comments

StringCheese said…
Bravo Casey Peplow! That is a wonderful, cohesive, coherent, logical letter. Too bad the Board has checked out and the SPS management doesn't seem to care.
Anonymous said…
Excellent!!

SW Mom
Anonymous said…
I hope someone is reading this at the board meeting tomorrow.

Alki parent
Anonymous said…
I hope the Concord author submits a version of this to The Seattle Times as an opinion piece. It's excellent.

EdVoter

seattle citizen said…
Lots of people signed up to comment on bell times tonight. ONE to comment on this massive upheaval, this ridiculous displacement, of staff from their schools five weeks into the year. This is causing untold trauma to individual educators, to cohesive staffs, and thereby to the students they serve. Ridiculous. It must be stopped.
mirmac1 said…
Here are the enrollment numbers used to make the Oct FTE adjustments. So the 2015-16 forecast was for 854 students. The Oct HC was on 465 short of projections.

Octr Adjustment Summary

Add to these the SpEd FTE adjustments, compare to School Allocation Budgets from May, with the August tweaks.

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