Community Meeting Today to Explain the Budget Process
You might be thinking, "Gee, Melissa, not much notice."
My thought exactly.
I had seen this on the district's calendar at the end of last week but thought it might be something internal. But no, it's this:
But anyway, there is no notice about this at the home page of the district.
There is no description of this from the calendar page except for notifying people there might be a possible quorum of directors if more than four of them show up.
So the district wants parents and community to better understand the budget process but they don't put out any clear, real notification on the meetings? Not good.
Just a heads up, there's supposed to be another meeting in September but no details yet available.
My thought exactly.
I had seen this on the district's calendar at the end of last week but thought it might be something internal. But no, it's this:
Seattle Public Schools will be hosting a two-part budget work session to provide budget background information and gather feedback from our community partners and stakeholders.
I certainly would have put this up sooner (and I think I did say months ago there would be some community meetings on the budget process but there was no available info.) Apparently, I'm not on their "community partners" list even though I probably have the widest reach of any group.Session One (District Budget Overview): Tuesday, August 23,, 2016 from 3pm-5pm at the John Stanford Center for Educational Excellence, 2445 3rd Avenue South
· The first session will provide an overview of the budget, including information about District revenues and expenditures, as well as an overview of the state funding formula and the allocation model that the District uses to allocate funding to schools.
But anyway, there is no notice about this at the home page of the district.
There is no description of this from the calendar page except for notifying people there might be a possible quorum of directors if more than four of them show up.
So the district wants parents and community to better understand the budget process but they don't put out any clear, real notification on the meetings? Not good.
Just a heads up, there's supposed to be another meeting in September but no details yet available.
Comments
This kind of lead time is completely unacceptable for a public meeting. This is where the district could learn something from the City of Seattle from the departments related to transportation (SDOT), parks, and neighborhoods (DON) at least.
I just did a quick search BTW, for "public engagement tools for ranking school budgets social media" and came up with this, among others. Surely we can do better outreach.
Tools For Civic Engagement
http://www.gfoa.org/tools-civic-engagement-0
I believe that the Superintendent is doing all of the community engagement that he wants to do. If he wanted to do more, he would and if he wanted his staff to do more, they would.
I believe that the Board is exactly satisfied with these community engagement efforts. If they wanted more, they would insist on it.
Is this the current document to help support community engagement around the budget?
FY 2016-17 School Budget Development Instructions (Gold Book)
http://www.seattleschools.org/UserFiles/Servers/Server_543/File/District/Departments/Budget/Budget%20Development%202017/goldbook_singledoc17.pdf
Is there a way to view a draft budget somewhere -- or maybe just the last budget for ideas? I think what most of us are interested in are how much the district gets per pupil from the state and how much of those funds are going towards central administration. No?
Just saw this as well:
"The next Community Budget Presentation is scheduled for September 26, 2016 at the John Stanford Center for Educational Excellence."
Here's the agenda and here are the minutes.
One of their Key Performance Indicators was "Improve external engagement (beyond website)" but it was all about the District online. It had nothing to do with anything in the meatspace.
From the minutes: "Ms. Campbell pointed out that while principal satisfaction rate is high, family surveys indicate room for growth around our family outreach satisfaction rate, with those numbers trending down the last few years."
http://www.seattleschools.org/UserFiles/Servers/Server_543/File/District/Departments/Budget/Budget%20Book%202015-2016/adoptedbudget16.pdf
According to that doc:
Budgeted expenditures by State Activity for 2015-2016 are as follows (note percentages may not total to 100% due to rounding):
o 63.0% Teaching
o 9.5% Teaching Support
o 6.1% School Administration
o 15.5% Other Support Services e.g., Student Nutrition, Utilities, and Building Maintenance
o 5.8% Central Administration
reader47
Again I have learned so much from you and other contributors on the blog. However, your comment below is unfair and misplaced. I wish you still lived here to have heard the discussion at both the June 4th Board Retreat on community engagement issues and at the Work Session - as you know, minutes do not always reflect the tone, tenor, and detail. A couple of points:
1. The District and now a Task Force is meeting to fully build out the Community Engagement Tools recognizing and addressing the need for better engagement and transparency. 2. The poorly announced Budget Session was scheduled for the right reasons to give the community an earlier heads-up on the budget issues coming our way and to have several touch points for the public to engage. This is far better than has occurred in the past and I know Deputy Supt. Nielsen, Asst. Supt. Berge and Dir. Campbell are committed to a process that allows our communities to see how the budget is constructed not from "some secret process and group that doesn't take minutes on the priorities and divvying up a small complicated pie" (my words) has been done in the past. There will be another meeting on Sept. 26th (which will be far better advertised across different media) to allow for more input and education. There are promised additional budget sessions that the public will be invited to participate in - hugely important with the McCleary and Dorn cases ongoing and the potential levy cliff.
Is this - community engagement and the budget build - a great concern of mine and my fellow Board colleagues, Yes, emphatically yes.
A great deal of effort is going into these initiatives and yes we can and will be doing better.
Cordially,
Leslie Harris
SPS Director, Dist. 6
Exec. Audit & Finance Committees
leslie.harris@seattleschools.org
206.475.1000
I believe that the District is doing EXACTLY as well on community engagement as they wish to. If they wanted to do more, they would.
I believe that the Superintendent is doing all of the community engagement that he wants to do. If he wanted to do more, he would and if he wanted his staff to do more, they would.
I believe that the Board is exactly satisfied with these community engagement efforts. If they wanted more, they would insist on it.
Well, it was announced to some and I have wonder why "community partners" are more important than parents and just community. I give them an "F" on engagement. I do not think this an error; I think this was by design and it reflects poorly on whoever made that decision.
If the District wants to do more community engagement, what's stopping them? I don't see anything stopping them, so they must be doing all they care to do.
If the Superintendent wants to do more community engagement, what's stopping him? I don't see anything stopping him, so he must be doing all that he cares to do. The same goes for his staff.
If the Board is dissatisfied with the district's community engagement efforts, then tell me the initiative, the program, or the motion that the superintendent wanted to move forward but was stopped by the Board for lack of community engagement. If the Board has not said no to anything for a lack of community engagement, then the Board must, by definition, find the current level of community engagement to be satisfactory.
Correct me and I will acknowledge that I was wrong.
Enough to satisfy everybody would cost a lot of money.
Maybe better spent on teachers.
Sue
I expected them to eventually be co-opted into defending the system, as were Sharon Peaslee and Marty McLaren before them, but I thought it would take longer than this.
Wake me when this board finally demands accountability, change, and people's heads on pikes.
-Not Surprised
I'm not asking for big, catered events with balloons, bands, and bunting. I'm saying that the superintendent and staff should be forthcoming.
It's nothing that I hadn't seen before. All of it has been discussed before at Board Retreats and work sessions. None of it is new - not the materials, the tiers of engagement, the hand-wringing over distrust, the calls for a commitment, the chest-thumping claims that everyone wants to do better, nor the thinly veiled contempt for the public. And, just as before, it ended without any real resolution - and I mean that in both ways. The issue wasn't settled and there is no evidence of a hard line commitment from anyone in attendance.
The staff usually decides that the proper level of community engagement is the lowest one, inform, and they don't seem to recognize that they typically fail to do even that. The budget meeting featured in this post is an excellent example. The refusal to acknowledge the dissolution of Spectrum or the replacement of Advanced Learning with MTSS are two more. The cloud of lies around Special Education - in which the staff claims there are no programs any more, and then, in the very next breath, talk about where the programs are. The cloud of lies around the definition of the words "curriculum", "content", "course of study", "school", "program", "service", "cluster", "cohort", and other malleable edu-crat jargon. And, of course, the long, long list of broken promises. Where is the written, taught, and tested curriculum for HC? Let's start with that one.
From the final paragraph of the minutes:
"The different groups reported out the levels they reached, most at consult/involve, and noted the importance to maintain promises made to the community."
By this, of course, they meant promises made in the future. They attach ZERO importance to maintaining promises made to the community in the past.
Perhaps I'm being unfair. Read the minutes for yourself and tell me what you find.
I'll tell you this: there is a real disconnect between what the community thinks is important and what the staff thinks is important, and there is no reference in the minutes that anyone noticed that wide difference.
"How much do you want the district to spend, Charlie?"
It costs very little to post information to the web in a timely manner. That's one of the biggest bang for your buck things this district could do. And yet, we see that it doesn't happen.
"The staff usually decides that the proper level of community engagement is the lowest one, inform, and they don't seem to recognize that they typically fail to do even that."
Yup.
While I might not take as harsh a tone as Charlie, I have to agree. Y'all can meet and talk about community engagement till you are blue in the face but talking about it isn't doing it - it's pretty simple really - you post something on your website - maybe a tweet or two -maybe a facebook post that people can share with others, thereby increasing the engagement exponentially at little to no cost.
These are not complex concepts. The fact that SPS continues to talk around the issue rather than just doing the dang engagement piece is so telling....either no one really knows what the other parts are doing (highly likely) or no one truly CARES about this issue enough to just do it. Without 1000 words on the hows/whys/when/who - just plain doing it would solve so much angst aimed at SPS...
reader47
As for Outsider's question of "Why bother?", the board and the staff answered that question. They have reasons to engage the public. And there is a whole lot of stuff that is NOT dictated by contract or law. A whole lot.
I'm not sure that you'll find a lot of folks who share the view that the core mission of public education is social engineering, but I can see it is what you sincerely believe and I won't bother to try to talk you out of it. Your clear lack of confidence in democracy is likewise beyond my ability to alter.
So thanks for spilling your vitriol and please come and do it again soon.
Democracy is voting for school board and the legislature. It's working great. I guess.
But what reasons do the Board and staff have for community engagement? If there were a topic on which they would let community sentiment influence the decision, they would have a reason. But there are few such topics. Charlie #1 seems to recognize that.
Aside from that, politicians generally prefer (rightly or wrongly) that the public not see too much inside the sausage factory, and the staff even more so. There is a fantasy that the right sort of community engagement would bring out a groundswell of support for all the things they plan to do anyway, but it's no surprise that the elected school board doesn't act too strongly on that fantasy.
Of course there is a "deep district" that ignores the board, because they can. The deep district has its own relationships with activists and city elites, and knows where the ship is headed without any input from the board. The deep district knows the board is not really very powerful, and can be stared down at will. That's my cynical and vitriolic impression. But I am open to counter-evidence.
This is absolutely correct and a crucial insight. So far the new board members either do not realize this, are unwilling to confront it, or are making their allegiances with the "deep district." If our elected school board cannot overcome this and break the power of the "deep district" then we are going to see a total disaster in the form of a mayoral takeover in the very near future.
This current board is our last chance to fix these problems. But so far, not a single one of the new members has shown they are willing to uproot the JSCEE culture of lies, deceit, and willful ignorance of policy. I'm pretty disappointed so far. I hope they prove me wrong.
-Not Surprised
Yup. And nearly every superintendent is more than happy with that.