Seattle Schools This Week
Entering the last month of this school year this week, always an exciting time.
Wednesday, June 1st
School Board meeting, starting at 4:15 pm. Agenda.
Highlights
Board Executive Committee meeting, from 8:30-10:30 am. Agenda not yet available.
#WearOrange on June 2 for National Gun Violence Awareness Day.
Friday, June 3rd
The Center School Art-In for the arts.
The ART-IN will take place in TCS Commons June 3rd, from 2:10-4pm. It’s a positive opportunity to show the greater Seattle community why TCS deeply matters. There will be student art on display, an open mic for poetry, music, and student testimony, t-shirt making supplies, and a button maker. TCS is located at 305 Harrison Avenue, above the stage in the Seattle Center Armory.
Saturday, June 4th
Board Retreat, JSCEE, from 10 am-3pm. Agenda not yet available.
Wednesday, June 1st
School Board meeting, starting at 4:15 pm. Agenda.
Highlights
Action ItemsThursday, June 2nd
- a substantial change to program placement and school closure definitions in the first Action item
- audience participation at Board meetings. I do not agree with this policy as written because it would potentially allow all speaker slots to go to student speakers. I think for parents and taxpayers this is just an unfair advantage especially given the first speaker slot is reserved for high school students and so is a place at the dais for a high school student at Board meetings.
Intro Items
Fourteen items, most of them relating to BEX/BTA contracts.
Board Executive Committee meeting, from 8:30-10:30 am. Agenda not yet available.
#WearOrange on June 2 for National Gun Violence Awareness Day.
Friday, June 3rd
The Center School Art-In for the arts.
The ART-IN will take place in TCS Commons June 3rd, from 2:10-4pm. It’s a positive opportunity to show the greater Seattle community why TCS deeply matters. There will be student art on display, an open mic for poetry, music, and student testimony, t-shirt making supplies, and a button maker. TCS is located at 305 Harrison Avenue, above the stage in the Seattle Center Armory.
Saturday, June 4th
Board Retreat, JSCEE, from 10 am-3pm. Agenda not yet available.
Comments
1. It means that things that looks, act, and feel exactly like school closures, but are not technically school closures, will be treated like school closures. They will be given the transparency and public communication that the staff refused to provide unless required to do so.
2. It requires the superintendent to provide the rationale for program placement decisions at the time of the decision instead of promising to provide the rationale later - a promise that historically has gone unfulfilled.
3. It removes some confusing and meaningless language from the program placement policy.
So the Supe is allowed to make decisions that put students' safety at risk? I think they may need to reword this. Maybe they meant they were referring to decisions made in response to situations in which students' safety was at risk?
And while they're revising this policy, why not also include something about Program Evaluation? There's no point in having a header for it if there's nothing there. Is it really too much to ask for them to include even basic information like they did for Strategic Planning--a simple copy and paste of 1 sentence, substituting "evaluation" for "strategic"? Evaluation: Development and oversight of District-wide evaluation plan.
HF
Also, the revised policy, like the current policy, refers to "programs and services", so Special Education is included in the policy even if it is re-defined as a service.
"The Superintendent is authorized to make the placement and closure decisions of services, except for services governed by the student assignment plan or other Board policies (e.g., Policy No. 2190 regarding Highly Capable services). The Superintendent is granted this authority in order to address time sensitive decisions that allow the district to provide instruction to students as soon as possible (e.g., Special Education services). The Board will be informed of service decisions in a timely manner, and prior to the decision(s) being made, and will receive quarterly updates."
The Superintendent makes the decision, NOT the Board. The "time-sensitive" decisions are hogwash. We're not talking IEPs here, we're talking capacity and convenience for staff.
They're losing the art teacher because they choose to (or are required to) use the funding they receive for teachers of other subjects. For example, TCS has to offer four years of English to its students. At 240 students and 30 students per classroom, that would require 8 English periods per day. If they hire two full time English teachers, those teachers will have to teach one elective class each to fill their five period days. That elective isn't likely to be art. The school must offer three years of science. 180 of the 240 students taking science requires six class periods of science per day. How do they staff that?
This is the problem with staffing small schools.
The school has been around long enough that enrollment should be fairly predictable. If the reason is decline in numbers, is it 5 students or 25 students? If the former, they need to buck up and fund the teacher, if the latter the district needs to find out why the decline at a time when high schools are over-enrolled and address it.
In any case, staffing issues should not be the responsibility of the students, that needs to be handled by the principal. (Just like the GHS principal needed to get a teacher to teach choir!)
This pattern of students taking on the jobs of the adults in our schools is getting old.
There might not be 8 periods of English a day, but there has to be about 40 instructional hours of English per week. A full time teacher provides 25 instructional hours each week. The staffing problem is the same.
I don't think the students should be responsible for solving this either. I do think until we have enough money to fund everything we believe is necessary, we can't spend extra money to provide small school options. Schools should be funded to provide students the opportunity to meet their graduation requirements. If a school wants to offer a wider variety of electives, it has to attract (and keep) enough students to provide the funding for those classes or hire teachers who can teach multiple subjects or who want to work less than full time. TCS seems to lose students between 10th and 11th grades. I wonder what they would need to change to keep those students (and their basic education funding).
This is what the superintendent said about the situation in last week's Friday Memo: Center School Enrollment and Staffing –We have about a dozen such staffing situations that should be mitigated because we mitigate them every year due to the school’s unique program configurations (K-8; dual language, etc.). We could approve this year’s requests if we give up some of the $2M being held for Fall enrollment losses or use one-time, non-sustainable underspend funds.
So, should we allocate money to small schools or ensure elementary students don't lose teachers in October?
So guess Nyland needs to make a big decision here!
(and what I meant is that students shouldn't be fighting to retain staff or teaching classes in the absence of staff, we need more adults in the room!)
NEmom
None of this means that students with ieps are not general Ed students. all day long. They are. But the seats have to be funded somehow.
Speddie
Franklin HS
Bailey Gatzert
Beacon Hill
Concord
Dunlap
Emerson
Graham Hill
Hawthorne
Highland Park
Lowell
M.L. King
Madrona K-8
Roxhill
The mitigation is in the form of a 0.5 AP at $73K a pop, with the exception of Franklin which is getting 1.0 HS AP at $160K.
Makes no sense to me what-so-ever.
Right. Of course not very individualized. But... If schools are going to make students with disabilities sit in special ed classes to get their specially designed instruction - for any amount of time - then the district should not be sending one dime to schools to pay for a general ed seat that they will not be using. Let's reward schools monetarily for the inclusion they actually do, and stop stripping funding away from our students with disabilities.
Speddie
It is a broken system, though.
-Sped parent
Speddie
The Seattle Times did a piece on the city's prek program. The cost of 15 prek classrooms is $14.5M. Essentially, the city is paying almost $1M per preK class. The city is providing the district with $220K- $250K per classroom. In essence, the city has plenty of funding for their prek program. Where the dollars are going is anyone's guess.
As well, not only are they spending from the stand-alone pre-K levy but there's $7M in the Families&Education levy for pre-K as well. Wish a bit of that $7M could go to shore up all the IB programs.