Friday Memo of September 16, 2016
Oh, these Friday Memos and the stuff you find in them.
The Superintendent's letter covered a lot of topics quickly. His recap of the Board Retreat would is, I suspect, better than the Board Retreat. It covered all of the topics at about the same level of detail, but used up only a few seconds of reading time instead of a whole day. It's mostly platitudes until the One Time Funds part at the end. The good news there is money to start the middle school math adoption (we can see the beginning of the end for CMP II), and money for IB and teacher cut back mitigation.
In the brief blurb about the Seattle Center, we learn that the school district's needs (which includes a high school) were among the primary topics for discussion. The superintendent has made it clear that it is up to the Board to decide where and how to add north end elementary HCC capacity.
Michael Tolley's letter includes a feeble defense of the arbitrary caps put on Special Education enrollment at Option Schools. In his letter he makes reference to a document that speaks to the heart of the issue. Of course, the document, Special Education Program Placement in Option Schools, is not attached. The central question, which Mr. Tolley does not address, is how does the District set the cap for Special Education enrollment at Option Schools? Or at any other schools, for that matter.
The Facilities and Operations letter says that there will be will be a community meeting at Madrona on Tuesday, September 20, 2016 from 6-7pm where the district will be sharing more information and collecting feedback on changing Madrona from a K-8 to an elementary school when Meany Middle School reopens as a comprehensive middle school in the fall of 2017.
The HR letter says that there are 94 teacher vacancies in the district right now including 21 elementary teachers and 19 special education teachers.
The Superintendent's letter covered a lot of topics quickly. His recap of the Board Retreat would is, I suspect, better than the Board Retreat. It covered all of the topics at about the same level of detail, but used up only a few seconds of reading time instead of a whole day. It's mostly platitudes until the One Time Funds part at the end. The good news there is money to start the middle school math adoption (we can see the beginning of the end for CMP II), and money for IB and teacher cut back mitigation.
In the brief blurb about the Seattle Center, we learn that the school district's needs (which includes a high school) were among the primary topics for discussion. The superintendent has made it clear that it is up to the Board to decide where and how to add north end elementary HCC capacity.
Michael Tolley's letter includes a feeble defense of the arbitrary caps put on Special Education enrollment at Option Schools. In his letter he makes reference to a document that speaks to the heart of the issue. Of course, the document, Special Education Program Placement in Option Schools, is not attached. The central question, which Mr. Tolley does not address, is how does the District set the cap for Special Education enrollment at Option Schools? Or at any other schools, for that matter.
The Facilities and Operations letter says that there will be will be a community meeting at Madrona on Tuesday, September 20, 2016 from 6-7pm where the district will be sharing more information and collecting feedback on changing Madrona from a K-8 to an elementary school when Meany Middle School reopens as a comprehensive middle school in the fall of 2017.
The HR letter says that there are 94 teacher vacancies in the district right now including 21 elementary teachers and 19 special education teachers.
Comments
"development of the MSC Eligibility Decision process"
Really?
According to the Al website it's been up and running for a while; the Multidisciplinary Selection Committee (MSC).
misprint
I'm not an expert, so maybe I'm missing something....
That's my understanding too. District administration seems to be dragging their heels on accepting it though.
NwMom
My youngest graduated sometime ago, but when she was in elementary, inability to find subs had several classrooms in the cafeteria, so that they could share teachers.
http://komonews.com/news/local/school-principals-state-teacher-shortage-is-now-a-crisis-12-02-2015
Seattle really needs to get a handle on why they cannot keep and attract good new teachers, before we have an exodus of families like we did in the 60's& 70's. ( which I expect was due to the Evergreen bridge completion as well as busing)
S parent
And, of course, the years of denigration of educators, the placing the blame for societal and system failures on their shoulders does not improve morale. Pretty tough to come into the profession wanting to educate and work with children because you love them and want to further their lives and then have it inferred or stated directly that you're racist, you basically suck, you are a "dinosaur" stuck in "the status quo" and are a leach on society...That's not a healthy environment in which to work.
Even though Seattle has been growing for years now, Seattle has also done RIFs in the Spring. This means that teachers are let go in the Spring and then need to be re-hired in August or September. By that point, many (most) of the teachers are long gone.
You can really see this at high school. High School Spanish is an incredible challenge district wide, because each school RIFs and re-hires independently and electives like Spanish are an easy target because it used-to-be easy to re-hire in September. However, that is just not the case any longer.
I wrote a longer explanation that Mel blogged a few months ago, under that I would do with the budget reserve. Displacing and re-hiring is expensive and just plain unnecessary with the growth in Seattle.
Many of these changes can be seen on the staffing adjustments FAQ.
http://www.seattleschools.org/cms/One.aspx?portalId=627&pageId=11554819
Of those 90 vacancies, a chunk are special ed which probably has high turnover; and others probably require hard-to-find endorsements or something. The number of vanilla classroom jobs open doesn't seem that big, and probably there are plenty of applicants.
Anything else worth mentioning?
Keeping up
I'm not fishing: I'm very happy with where I work! But I think the district is shooting itself in the foot here.
How does Seattle Public Schools set the cap on Special Education enrollment at both option schools and Attendance Area schools?
How - and why - does the District determine the maximum enrollment for students receiving any sort of services (Special Education, ELL, ALO, Spectrum, HC, etc.) at any schools?
In a related question, how does the District determine the maximum enrollment for students in programs (Spectrum, HCC, Special Education, BOC, Montessori, Language Immersion, Biotech, etc.) at schools?
I have been through both the policy and the procedure, and they don't provide an answer. The entire process appears arbitrary to me. I have been down this road before and I have never heard a satisfactory answer. The enrollment caps are not explained. One would think they either spring out of the ground or fall from the sky.
My suspicion is that the principal sets them unilaterally based on any method the principal chooses. I remember very clearly one year when Jeff Clark set the enrollment cap for 6th grade Spectrum at Denny at 12. In that year, 25 Spectrum students applied for enrollment at Denny so 13 of them were waitlisted. No rationale for the enrollment cap was offered, but the District assured me that the cap would be adjusted to 25 so all of the students could enroll. They never explained where the cap came from or why it was necessary.
2hc
I am not an expert at this, but from my experience at a school with robust special education programming, the "room" for special ed students is based upon the delivery model(s), student:teacher ratio, etc...if the student:teacher ratio is exceeded, then, in theory, the school should get additional teachers and classrooms for special ed.
To my knowledge, the attendance-area school my kids attended followed the SAP, with kids living in the attendance area getting enrollment preference. This resulted in the special education programming being overloaded. The school eventually expanded its Special education programming. I'm not a parent there anymore, so I don't know if special ed programming is still maxed out. I do know that school capacity is maxed out (unless more portables can be added).
-North-end Mom
@Charlies Mas, the capping issue is the heart of the issue--the caps on attendance schools and options schools. Who and how the caps are determined and who and how some students get in and others do not is a mystery.The memo does not improve the transparency on this issue, and only further illuminates the fact that there is no process or procedure that Special Education Administration can articulate. Further, the legitimacy of having a cap on a service at an attendance school is another mystery. If Special Education truly is a service, and the service is available in the attendance area school, then the service out to be available to a student who lives in the attendance area.
I appreciate the fact that there was a legitimate attempt to present data. This is an improvement from past practices. I am not sure that the K-8 data that is presented is accurate or complete. In any case, it is difficult to analyze because although it includes statistics on students at K-8 schools and elementary schools, it does not include the data from comprehensive middles schools. It reflects figures on 27,146 general education students in K-8, 2852 special education students and only 960 students who receive intensive special education services. It would have been helpful to have the data on the option schools also include the general education enrollment at the option schools. I can find this information separately, but it's just going to take more time to analyze.
If I were a school board member who had asked for data and a presentation to the board by October, I would not be satisfied at all with the response of putting off a presentation and discussion to the board until May simply because there is an OCR complaint on the same issue that has not been resolved. Putting this discussion off until May because the there have been a lot of formal complaints on this issue only further promotes injustice for families, as another session of open enrollment will have come and gone by then.
I ask that school directors hold the administration to their original direction: a presentation to the board in a work session by October 31, 2016.
-alias
By the way, the district has also said it "assigns" students with more significant disabilities "the same as everybody else". It also says that "every comprehensive secondary school has every service". Those are both lies. So, do you believe the resource room story? Or is that a lie too?
Spedvocate
Spedvocate
Your beliefs as to what might be going on are pure speculation at this time. As I have no proof of anything different from what the district says, I am going to go with what the say until I know otherwise.