Work Session - Live Blogging
Update 4: Good news, kids. The Board listened and has pushed back - for multiple reasons - on taking the word "transition" from the SAP. That means, that the current transition plan will stand as an adjunct to the 2009 SAP. It was not mentioned but I would assume that doesn't mean it precludes updates to the Transition plan but that plan will not become the SAP.
Good work to those of you who contacted the Board because they heard you, loud and clear.
Update 3: Starting SAP. Director Harris has elected to have this portion of Work Session videotaped but I'm not sure when/how that will be available.
Staff seems to think that they can push this thru quickly because of Open Enrollment and high school boundaries.
Update 2:
Nearing the end of the scheduled time for Budget and only about half thru the PowerPoint. Blanford seems to be making a large number of comments, more comments than questions. I'm not sure what to make of it. Is he making points before he leaves in a couple of weeks? (The other directors are mostly asking questions.) But time is running out.
Still no SAP documentation for the meeting.
Update 1:
Director Harris is here now as is school board candidate, Eden Mack.
There are still no SAP documents available to look at. Hmm.
End of Update 1
Right now, entire Board is hearing about budget issues. The entire Board is there except Director Harris.
There are two documents on Advanced Learning and I will try to post the new one later on but it's not very helpful.
3 Problems to Solve
- HC pathway capacity at Garfield in future years
- Increasing opportunities to AL across the district
- aligning any possible changes with new high school boundaries (implemented in 2019-2020)
Nothing about professional development or curriculum. Nothing about testing and finding new students (maybe number two but that one could mean finding new kids OR more AL opps in schools).
Good work to those of you who contacted the Board because they heard you, loud and clear.
Update 3: Starting SAP. Director Harris has elected to have this portion of Work Session videotaped but I'm not sure when/how that will be available.
Staff seems to think that they can push this thru quickly because of Open Enrollment and high school boundaries.
Update 2:
Nearing the end of the scheduled time for Budget and only about half thru the PowerPoint. Blanford seems to be making a large number of comments, more comments than questions. I'm not sure what to make of it. Is he making points before he leaves in a couple of weeks? (The other directors are mostly asking questions.) But time is running out.
Still no SAP documentation for the meeting.
Update 1:
Director Harris is here now as is school board candidate, Eden Mack.
There are still no SAP documents available to look at. Hmm.
End of Update 1
Right now, entire Board is hearing about budget issues. The entire Board is there except Director Harris.
There are two documents on Advanced Learning and I will try to post the new one later on but it's not very helpful.
3 Problems to Solve
- HC pathway capacity at Garfield in future years
- Increasing opportunities to AL across the district
- aligning any possible changes with new high school boundaries (implemented in 2019-2020)
Nothing about professional development or curriculum. Nothing about testing and finding new students (maybe number two but that one could mean finding new kids OR more AL opps in schools).
Comments
TMP
N by NW
Now how did we get into this mess. Same mess that we had when Tolley closed schools with MGJ right? Who is still here through all of this?!?! Makes you shake your head. This colossal public engagement blunder is another in a long line of mistakes. One constant throughout though: MGJ, SE, JB and now Nyland with all these runaway disasters we families have endured. Enough I say. Ready, fire - aim. It is no way to run a district. There are too many folks affected. This is the major leagues being run by keystone administrators. Where were these regional executives speaking up about this?
And to give all the choice to the staff and schools away from the students and parents is not only inane it is unethical. Forcing families into schools they don't want to go to, so it is easier at the end of enrollment is lazy.
Any other updates would be greatly appreciated. This has all been maddening.
GIGO
Going Home
If option schools (I'm suspecting Language immersions - some of the others, at least in the north end have wait lists at all/most grades so could easily be backfilled most of the time) are such an enrollment conundrum, why not look at why vs setting up harsh rules that make parents of very young kids required to stick with a decision that may not make sense by 2nd to 5th grade? Do they lose kids across all languages? Do they lose more kids in Japanese than Spanish (maybe only offer Spanish instead)? Do they lose kids who end up on IEPs for various things and either the supports the kids need are not available or the specific learning disability makes trying to gain fluency in a 2nd language simply too challenging? If either is the case, the district really can't stop them from moving anyway. Maybe it's simple attrition and the issue is they can't be backfilled because of the language foundations, but it doesn't seem like the district has put that much thought into it - more like here's a Band-Aid we can slap on this cut, never mind the details.
It seems the only real way to "fix" some of these issues is to actually build some slack in the system. We can't have a functional system where each class has exactly maximum number of students permitted. Kids simply don't come in such neat little boxes and no matter how hard they try to force it, with what you get varying so wildly from school to school, many parents will make significant efforts to make changes that will work better for their kids.
NE Parent
NE Parents
Another institutional memory gap, is that during the years when there was this much churn, open enrollment was typically delayed so that there was enough process time for the boundaries and SAP changes. The narrative that we need to pass this today, to not delay open enrollment is just not historically accurate.
I think it is worth pointing out to the Board and to staff that there is a difference between how those terms are interpreted by the wider community, and that they need to define both terms in the assignment plan. I think that will head off a lot of argument later in the process.
- questions
You mentioned there were 3 docs re: AL, and that something indicated there were "3 Problems to Solve." Were all three of the bullets you mentioned specific to AL? If so, the last one--"aligning any possible changes with new high school boundaries (implemented in 2019-2020)"--would be very good news. Solving the problem of how AL fits with the proposed boundaries now is a big piece of the puzzle.
DisAPP
-questions
I had a similar insight. Deputy Superintendent, Steve Nielsen, worked at SPS prior to 2003.
The increase in K cohort sizes started in 2003. As such, the vast majority of parents that read this blog and/or have students in high school have been in SPS during an era of increasing cohort sizes. Additionally, most of us are capacity-hardened veterans and have been dealing with over-capacity challenges.
Steve Nielsen, worked at SPS during an era of decreasing total enrollment and decreasing cohort sizes and the conversation that started in advance of school closures. The "staffing allocation" is a textbook description of how you handle enrollment when it is decreasing.
The major disconnect between these two models really has to do with what happens when you have substantial wait lists. The staffing model accurately explains why you would have 5-6 students on the waitlist, even with physical capacity. However, McGilvra is another good example. They have 12 teaching stations and they are now down to 10 teachers, despite a 40 student wait list.
Most of us parents look at that and are baffled that these 40 students were not admitted to the school so that McGilvra would operate at true capacity. Staff has another point of view.
N
There are many things that Enrollment planning could do to formulate a 2018 plan that would help high school capacity.
Ingraham - It might be challenging and/or expensive and/or inconvenient to place additional portables of some sort at Ingraham. That said, Ingraham has a huge campus and two very large parking lots. I sincerely doubt that it is not possible to place up to a dozen portables at Ingraham for just one year. While it is not a great solution, it would be equivalent to what has already happened at Ballard, Roosevelt and Garfield and it would set Ingraham up for solid enrollment once the addition is open.
The Center School - The Center School was designed with capacity for 400 students. TCS has been actively recruiting students and they had a wait list last year. If enrollment planning were willing to commit to enroll up to 400 students, I have no doubt that we would see a substantial increase in their enrollment next year. Center is a great choice in general and with so many school so over-crowded, there are likely many students in the upper grades would be happy to pick this smaller, more personal environment.
Additionally, if there were some greater transparency about just how many students are being pushed into Running Start, I would suspect that some students would be considering Center and Nova as valid options. Students do not receive their high school schedules until after open enrollment ends. If their schedule is not going to work, by the time a family knows this is a problem, Center is no longer an option.
Franklin / Cleveland - There is physical capacity at both Franklin and Cleveland. There are many students in the Garfield area that would prefer those options. Committing to enroll more students at Franklin and Cleveland would provide more space in the system and help Garfield. Enrollment Planning has been unwilling to do this, because they are afraid this might have a detrimental impact on Rainier Beach. That said, capacity issues for 2018 are severe enough that that issue needs to be addressed.
Rainier Beach needs to be first up on the next BEX. A public commitment and public timeline for a full building remodel for Beach would go a long way to mitigate those challenges.
That is just a few things ... there are many more and I suspect other folks on the blog have ideas that could really help to manage high school capacity.
Brainstorming
messy
Brainstorming
I realize in many cases it's not possible (e.g., a bunch of current-Ingraham students would be reassigned to Ballard under map option Hv2 to backfill many of the Ballard students that will move to Lincoln, but because Lincoln won't be ready next year there won't be room to take in all those students a year early). However, under the same map scenario another group of current-Ballard students would be reassigned to Ingraham. That sort of "student swapping" seems like a ripe opportunity to work out enrollment deals that benefit students of both schools and allow them to spend 4 years in the same place.
I'm not sure how that would work logistically, but it seems like something to advocate for in the 2018 assignment plan. It would certainly add to the challenge of maintaining and moving waitlists, but it almost seems like a new tiebreaker should be added, with "impending geosplit" the #1 priority tiebreaker--and some serious effort to move the lists and work things out.
DisAPP
-NW Mom
QA Parent
-a parent
WW
Ballard- 1933 Oct (down from 1952 in Sept)
Garfield- 1857 Oct
Roosevelt-1870 Oct
Ingraham 1390 Oct
-sardine
Enrollment is stating that the challenge is construction and trailers & that only one portable would be feasible. But it sounds like Ingraham has alot of space so what gives?
I can't make the meeting, but if someone is going to the Ballard meeting tonight, maybe can ask?
-NW
You can only really figure out the full time RS numbers as the part time ones disappear in the FTE mystery numbers.
These are the Running Start students, that are over and above the already over-crowded high school. Is this normal? Is there always this many RS students? Can someone ask about this at the Ballard meeting???
Ballard - 10 Juniors and 41 Seniors, plus about another 50 FTEs in part time students
Garfield - 24 Juniors and 59 Seniors, plus about another 100 FTEs in part time students
Roosevelt - 9 Juniors and 21 Seniors, plus about another 50 FTEs in part time students.
- grumpy parent
curious
http://www.seattleschools.org/UserFiles/Servers/Server_543/File/District/Departments/REA/data_and_reports/P223_October2017ADA.pdf
- grumpy parent
The HCC rep said that they were going to have 2019-20 plans for HCC in place by December 6. Michael Tolley said that they were planning to have a proposal by then, so a little more hedging. There is a lot of talk about linked schools for HCC, so I would expect that is the direction things will go. The talk is all amorphous right now, so there is not a clear plan to look at.
Rick Burke said a couple of times that he wanted everybody to know their HS assignment pathway for the foreseeable future (ie past 2020) by January 17.
There were a lot of Magnolia parents there talking about the difficulty of getting from Magnolia to Lincoln. I expect a pretty strong contingent at board meetings advocating for a map that keeps them at Ballard.
-Other Lynn
This is interesting because there are 4 portables here already. Did Mr. Herndon mean 4 more? The area east of the gym, where portables were in the past, is going to be where the construction staging is going to be. If 4 more go in, that would make an already tight parking situation worse. I would be curious to see how that gets mitigated.
"You mentioned there were 3 docs re: AL, and that something indicated there were "3 Problems to Solve." Were all three of the bullets you mentioned specific to AL?"
Yes, these 3 bullet points were all part of the AL discussion (although they were not all fully discussed).
Dec. 6th for an AL plan? Folks, they are just pushing that work further and further out so that 1) it runs right into holidays and you'll be distracted and 2) the further out, the more "we have to hurry." Don't allow yourself to be distracted or rushed.
I'll have a wrap-up of each section of the work session but yes, staff were trying to pass off using the latest transition plan as the SAP but with updates and clean-ups.
Ashley Davies was trying to say that the things not in the Transition Plan were all things represented elsewhere in policy, procedure, etc. Director Burke said it would be best to see a complete red-lined 2009 SAP with notations of where things that are deleted are represented. Or, if eliminated, that should be explained.
I thought that a not-so-good thing for Ms. Davies to say because even one deletion that is NOT represented elsewhere makes her claim sound hollow.
But sometimes it seems like staff wastes time by doing these things that no Board member in their right mind could say okay to.
On this blog we've already pointed out numerous still-relevant issues that were covered in the 2009 SAP but are missing from the new draft, and I'm sure there are many more. Oops. Do we really need to do their work for them and identify ALL the omissions ourselves? Do we need to send Ms. Davies a cheat-sheet?
oopsie
Also, will space make it mandatory that they find some sort of 9th grade solution for next year? Ballard is our reference school and I'm sure it will be packed to the gills, but will they not allow that to happen?
Thanks to all of you for your perspectives,
Mag parent
But don't count on plans being truly hashed out before March. Lowell elementary students were told of a move to Lincoln on the last day of school in June. They finally acknowledged their plans to cram students in at Lowell just weren't going to work. My guess is SPS is going to wait until after open enrollment to deal with the 2018 space crunch.
SPS skeptic
Thanks,
another NW parent
Mag parent
Overflowing
Again: Get this enrollment plan resolved well and resolved immediately Seattle Public Schools. Parents were as usual way ahead of SPS administration in warning that our system was headed for a mess this year unless much more comprehensive data analysis , public outreach, and possible policy revisions (not to mention partnership with the City of Seattle) were to be put in place in 2014..15..16..17. And here we are. It's agonizing to watch.
EdVoter
When a service is not offered at all schools, then if your neighborhood school doesn't offer the service you need, there can be a "linked school" to provide that service for your neighborhood, which is a designated school that is fairly nearby and becomes your assignment so that you can receive the necessary service. So for example if Loyal Heights doesn't offer some particular service that is offered at Whittier, then Whittier can be the linked school for the Loyal Heights neighborhood and any student in the Loyal Heights area who needs that service can be assigned to Whittier. In theory the assignment plan should include a complete list for every service, stating for each school whether the service is offered, and if not then what is the linked school for that particular service.
Irene
-another NW parent
That is almost right, but each school would have only one linked school for each service that it does not provide. So students within the Lincoln boundary who need a service that is not at Lincoln, and for which the linked school is Ballard, would all be assigned to Ballard. It's not really a choice: if they don't need the service, they go to their neighborhood school; if they do need the service, they go to the linked school. If they want to choose any other school they would have to participate in the open choice assignment process.
Pathways work slightly differently. For some pathways, students are automatically assigned to the next school in their pathway, and can opt to go back to their neighborhood school if they wish. For others, students are automatically assigned to their neighborhood school, and can opt to be assigned to their pathway school if they wish. So with a pathway there is an actual choice to make (except in the case where the pathway school happens to be the same as their neighborhood school).
Irene
So confusing
Irene: thanks for the good explanations!
Michael Rice: That would be 4 more portables. We're in such a mess on high school capacity from Garfield north that parking problems for a year are the least of our worries. Neither Garfield nor Ballard can accommodate more students than they have right now, neither can add more portables, and both have more students coming down the pipeline. Roosevelt is also full, although maybe not quite so bad. Hale and Ingraham are about the only places that can physically take more students. I would guess that portables would go in the south parking lot, but don't know for sure.
It's also confusing because this idea of linked schools makes it sound like you'll only have one guaranteed HCC option (plus the option of IHS and your neighborhood school, presumably), whereas earlier comments by another poster who attended the Eckstein meeting said that if they created multiple north end pathways they wanted to give choices rather than assigning you to a specific one. Either different people are interpreting things differently, or staff are saying different things to different people and/or at different meetings.
roller coaster
On your second point, I am the poster who attended the Eckstein meeting and heard Wyeth Jesse mention the word "choice" a few times to convey the idea that a HCC high school student could perhaps choose from among more than one HCC high school. (But I wonder how that could work for a more popular school where the announced HCC tiebreakers are currently "sibling" then "lottery," and also for Garfield where we have been told that new north end HCC students will definitely not be placed after 2019.) In my hearing at the Eckstein open house, Wyeth Jesse did not use the term "linked schools" although he did use the term "pathways."
Eric B is the poster who attended the Ballard open house and reported back in this thread on 10/26 at 9.09 pm: "There is a lot of talk about linked schools for HCC, so I would expect that is the direction things will go. The talk is all amorphous right now, so there is not a clear plan to look at." As others explain and as you point out, "linked schools" for high school HCC services don't seem to leave room for "choice" among them . . but again I don't know how guaranteed new HCC "pathways" could leave room for "choice" either.
I think the difference staff saw between linked schools and pathways is that there were relatively few pathways and more linked schools. The linked schools idea also seems to have come up pretty recently as a middle ground between sending all HCC students back to their neighborhood schools and having a couple of sites. So the name may shift around a little bit as the details get fleshed out.
"Q: Will there be a grandfathering of students identified as Highly Capable currently attending Garfield?
A: If changes are made, we will recommend to the Board that all HC students attending Garfield during the *2018-19* school year be grandfathered. Incoming HC freshmen in the *2019-20* school year will not be guaranteed a seat at Garfield unless they live in the neighborhood boundary. STUDENTS NOT IN THE GHS ATTENDANCE AREA MAY BE ASSIGNED TO OTHER PATHWAY SCHOOLS YET TO BE DETERMINED." (My emphasis added.)
For those interested, the staff's prepared announcement for the Garfield PTSA and all their Answers to Garfield families' Questions are posted fully in the current open thread on the Eckstein open house meeting.
Given this situation, I would not feel comfortable assuming anything at all about how pathways, linked schools, or student assignment in general, might work in the coming years, independently of how things have worked in the past. I would want to see a complete student assignment plan written out using consistent definitions, spelled out in simple terms, with complete details and lots of examples. There may be an argument that it will take too long and be too complicated to produce such a document, but that argument doesn't hold water, because whoever eventually does the student assignment truly needs such a document in order to perform the assignments with anything approaching consistency and fairness.
Irene
DisAPP
I understand Garfield would be forced to loose AP instructors if the HCC group shrinks significantly, but will the loss in students mean a cut to the counselor, nurse, office staff, janitorial, and assistant principal as well?
It seems like Garfield could loose a lot of money with these program changes.
West
But because so far there has always been only ONE HCC high school "pathway" -- ie, Garfield (Ingraham IBX has always only been an "option") -- I don't think it is strictly accurate to say that "In the past, there was a GUARANTEE of EITHER Ingraham or Garfield (or neighborhood school). Whichever option the student requested they got. Ingraham has since had a cap put on it, adding to enrollment pressure at Garfield." (My emphasis.) Ingraham was never guaranteed for HCC students, but previously that was not an issue when IBX was launched and numbers were lower. With overenrollment at Ingraham, that has now changed.
Irene, thanks for your very helpful explanations of "pathways" and "linked schools" as well as the confusion surrounding those terms. At the Eckstein open house, while Wyeth Jesse mentioned the word HCC high school "choice" a few times, he never said "guaranteed choice," so I always took him to mean it in what you refer to as the alternative sense "(b) possibly available through the open choice process" instead of the way Eric used it as "(a) guaranteed." This open enrollment "choice" does actually already exist for elementary and middle school HCC students due entirely to the introduction of several new "pathways" based on home address in the past few years. Because their non-pathway HCC program is space available for HCC eligible kids, the announced tiebreakers are "Sibling" (at the requested HCC school, but not necessarily in the HCC program) followed by "Lottery," and for HCC middle school also a "Feeder School" tiebreaker before "Lottery." With the imminent introduction of new high school HCC pathways/linked schools, perhaps this new availability of high school open enrollment "choice" is all that Wyeth Jesse meant. However, they might also be considering adding another high school tiebreaker before "Lottery" such as "Feeder School" (?) or "Distance" (remember that one from the Old SAP!).
Bottom line: Availabilty of "choice" aside, from 2019 all eligible high school HCC students will certainly need and will still receive a guaranteed seat in their own new "pathway" or "linked school" based on their home address. Otherwise, in violation of state law, they would have no access to HC services.
DisAPP
While IBX at Ingraham was technically an unguaranteed option, they [enrollment, not the school] did not cap the numbers until last year. They tried limiting IBX enrollment the previous year, but had to back off based on conflicting language on the SPS website (Ingraham and AL had language that it was a guaranteed option for those enrolling on time).
Then we are told this past year more north end HC students chose their neighborhood school over Garfield or Ingraham when families were given the vibe that they weren't welcome at Garfield and, if memory serves me, there were at least 30 students on the waitlist for Ingraham IBX. SPS enrollment intentionally limited choice enrollment at Ingraham. Families knew a change to boundaries would happen in 2019, along with a change to HC pathways, and they needed to make a choice based on what they thought would happen to programs in 2018-2019, and what that meant for the continuity of high school. With all the uncertainty, it sounds like a good number of families opted for their neighborhood school if it was Ballard or Roosevelt (where are the numbers?). I'm assuming a handful of students chose Hale as well.
The optimism expressed by Observer just seems naïve.
fact checker
You are correct that in addition to pathways with cohorts, Washington school districts can also check the OSPI box for honors or Running Start or the list goes on. But once they do check that box they must then offer that particular identified service to ALL eligible HCC students; they cannot offer that service to SOME eligible HCC students, but then say to others "Sorry, not enough room for you." Therefore UNLESS they abolish the Garfield HCC pathway too, any future HCC high school students from other neighborhoods who will be blocked from Garfield must then be given their own new alternative HCC pathway(s) -- and for known capacity reasons, this will include both north end and south end students. Thus from 2019 state law will indeed require the Seattle school district to offer new HCC pathways or linked schools with cohorts.
Also remember that in any event 9th and 10th graders cannot "simply be told, 'There's Running Start,'" because those college courses are only open to 11th and 12th graders.
Here's the form to OSPI from 2015:
http://www.seattleschools.org/UserFiles/Servers/Server_543/File/District/Departments/School%20Board/15-16agendas/081915agenda/20150819_HighlyCapab_Annual%20Plan.pdf
good fit
-NP
Others are correct that hat SPS does not have to provide what you think they do. For example, this past year they said they were eliminating honors LA and SS for 9th graders so everyone could be on the same track. When pointed out that they were required to provide advanced offerings at all grade levels, suddenly the 9th grade classes were called "honors for all." It's just window dressing, but OSPI is only window shopping.
DisAPP
I just can't imagine SPS not needing to provide a pathway for HCC students that live in the attendance areas of certain low performing high schools. Seems to me that would really cause equity problems.
But that doesn't stop SPS from making say 3 or 4 high schools in the north end HCC pathways; in essence the neighborhood high school is the HCC pathway high school in much of the north end. For example, why not make Roosevelt, Lincoln, and Ingram all HCC Pathway schools? Also, leave Garfield a pathway school and add a pathway school in West Seattle.
I would assume every student could then have a choice of their attendance area High School or a single HCC pathway HS. So, those that live in say the Roosevelt or Lincon areas effectively have no choice, but if you live in the Hale area, you would have a single alternative.
Seems like something like this would work.
It's interesting to go back to comments from 2009, related to high school APP:
http://discussapp.blogspot.com/2009/11/is-there-support-from-cao-for-high.html
wayback machine
History might not repeat itself, but it sure rhymes: don't ever (ever ever) assume that district administration has fully considered the implications of ANY plan. And usually, the programs that pay for those mistakes are the programs that can be sliced and moved: the two most likely candidates are usually HCC or SpEd
-wayway back
good fit, Exactly! Which only proves my claim that state law then requires SPS to provide each eligible student with another pathway/linked school that WILL provide him or her with equivalent HCC services. In other words, the only reason that SPS enrollment was able to cap Ingraham IBX (or IB?) HCC option students is because those students also have a guaranteed pathway to Garfield HCC.
Another Parent expressed this simple idea better than me:
"if there is an HCC high school pathway for some students, then there must be an HCC high school pathway for all students. I just can't imagine SPS not needing to provide a pathway for HCC students that live in the attendance areas of certain low performing high schools. Seems to me that would really cause equity problems."
good fit, thanks for that very helpful link to the OSPI form listing what services those HCC pathways might include.
!. Too many kids
It's not even close to best practice to pull such a high percentage of a district into a self-contained program.
2. Where are the poor, ELL, SpEd, black, hispanic, Hmong, Vietnamese, Somali, Ethiopian and other recent immigrants?
These kids are incredibly underrepresented.
3. Unlimited private tests allowed to gain entry.
Come on. Everyone knows this is horribly wrong. One free private test for poor kids doesn't equal UNLIMITED private tests for the affluent.
$. True outliers are sent off to the Robinson Center at UW or left to their own devices in a cohort that doesn't serve the needs of 3 standard deviation students.
super g
When IPP was created, back in the 1970s, the goal was clear: accelerate students so that they would complete the equivalent of high school by the end of 8th grade, so that they could enter university instead of ninth grade. That goal has long since been left far behind, and there has never been a coherent purpose stated since then.
Some parents like what it provides for their students, and that's great, but many students cannot find what they need there, and the district, in my experience, just suggests to those parents that they homeschool or go private, because the district is unwilling and/or unable to provide anything else.
I have heard staff say on many occasions that there is no way that the district can afford to provide any appropriate services to students who are 3 standard deviations away from the mean, simply because it is so unlikely that you could collect 30 such students in one grade at one school, and that is the only model they can afford to provide. I think that speaks to a lack of creative thinking and commitment to serve every student.
I have met such students who had the scholarly maturity to craft for themselves an excellent education out of the bits and pieces the district offered them. But it doesn't seem like that constitutes an actual program for educating students in general.
Irene
Parents would see through it and more of our strongest students would leave, but SPS likely wouldn't care.
DisAPP
"APP outgrew Lowell.." Kinda but they sent some kids to Lincoln and some to Thurgood Marshall. They should have created Cascadia but left kids at Lowell where the program worked very well, the kids interacted with their medically fragile population regularly and with good outcomes and the school itself was stable. It is not now.
"History might not repeat itself, but it sure rhymes: don't ever (ever ever) assume that district administration has fully considered the implications of ANY plan. And usually, the programs that pay for those mistakes are the programs that can be sliced and moved: the two most likely candidates are usually HCC or SpEd."
Absolutely and I will be advocating to the Board that when the SAP does start its evolution that parent focus groups be set up. Allow parents to ask question and help vet the SAP so that it will have good outcomes for all in the fairest manner. Staff should have to come and answer questions, "Where is this? Okay, what happens here?" so that the plan is vetted by people on the ground. If principals want in, that would be great.
As to that last statement on the programs that get hit the most - HCC and Sped are a moveable feast for staff.
Bring it on! That would open the district up for scrutiny of the actual HC laws that they are already breaking.
Use your money and privilege to help everyone else, too! Yeah!
About Time
-OT
When WA state only gave money to districts that could demonstrate they had accelerated programs for highly capable students, SPS had incentive to provide HC students with an accelerated program, however poorly defined. SPS supplemented overall transportation costs with some of the money the state gave them for transportation of HC students. It's why they sent letters to HCC families reminding them to put their students on the bus during count periods; there was financial benefit for more than just HCC.
The change in the RCW stating that for "highly capable students, access to accelerated learning and enhanced instruction" means all districts get money. The RCW does not define what constitutes “access” to accelerated learning or enhanced instruction.
Michael Tolley has long said he believes students are best served closest to their home address, classroom differentiation can meet all student learning needs, and that programs for highly capable students are inequitable.
Tolley is the administrator in charge of teaching. He's been vocal about his opposition to HCC for a long time. SPS has a highly compensated administrator who has made it clear he's opposed to adequately educating a group of students (and I'm not talking about "making sure the precious snowflakes get into Harvard" - I'm saying HCC students, and all SPS students, should get to learn at school, every day, in a way that generally follows state policy). Tolley knows it doesn't cost more. He still wants to put a stop to it. And there is no longer a threat of lost revenue to stop him from slowly taking HCC apart.
You could replace HCC with SpEd or ELL or even gen ed. I think the problem is that there are district administrators who see educating ANY group of students as unfair or inequitable or just somehow not really part of their job. It's a public system. None of the kids educated enrolled in our public schools should be neglected.
It's about how to provide for HC students with as little segregation as possible, same as SpEd, ELL, medically fragile, etc.
1000 HC students are NOT in the cohort so why does not the district let us know how those students navigate gened and how they are doing in their classes.
Are they different types of students? Are their reference schools different in some fundamental way?
Why did parents opt to stay local?
We know, if we have read this blog, why parents choose the cohort, but what about the parents who chose to opt out of it.
yil
Hey, you don't need to like the guy. But the dog whistles and racism in this post
need to be called out.
Not acceptable.
About Time
NW
how so
For us, we stayed at the local schools for elementary because (1) it offered something we couldn't get elsewhere (language immersion), and we could easily manage supplementation in other subjects in those early grades; and (2) HCC wasn't going to provide enough of a challenge for one kid anyway--if we were going to need to supplement regardless, why bother moving?
Regardless, the neighborhood school did not completely meets our children's academic needs--and in the end we regretted not moving over to HCC sooner. Not that HCC middle school went particularly well for either school, but the cohort became a little more important at that point. They tended to self-select other HCC-eligible kids as friends even in elementary school. Like minds and all that...
gone girl
DisAPP, you're wrong. If the district for the first time assigns high school HCC services based on home address, which it has never done before, for obvious equity reasons it will have to ensure that those geographic assignments (in effect neighborhood HCC pathways) are all essentially equivalent. They can't just offer an few extra honors classes at Nathan Hale and tell an eligible neighborhood HCC student assigned there that they enjoy HCC services equivalent to students currently assigned to Garfield, or for that matter Roosevelt or Ballard, both of which schools already have dozens of AP sections. For many eligible HCC students, the resulting inequity would also be exacerbated by comparing their available HCC services with school and neighborhood demographics.
The only way your statement might hold water is if you are assuming that every eligible HCC student would also have a new guaranteed option to attend some IB program, which we know is another OSPI acceptable method of providing HCC services. The Seattle high schools offering an IB program are Ingraham (already a non-guaranteed HCC option), as well as Rainier Beach and Chief Sealth International. But for transportation and capacity reasons, those schools may not work for all eligible HCC students, and only one of them currently offers the HCC IBX option.
Because it is considered a HCC service available to Seattle 11th and 12th graders, you and others do raise an interesting question whether the availability of Running Start for all could fully satisfy OSPI HC requirements? Perhaps not, for the equity reasons just stated? In any event, for every 9th and 10th grader, the district will still need to establish a new HCC pathway for each student excluded by their home address from Garfield HCC after 2019.
Maybe you don't mean to, but you seem to be advocating the unacceptable idea that under state law SPS can get away with just making up fake HCC high school pathways based on the student's particular home address. Not true. I'm with Melissa on this -- whatever OSPI HCC services SPS promises it must then actually deliver, or else it will face a successful lawsuit under state law and maybe also under federal law depending upon obvious equity disparities.
By the way, you were right on the money with your "working undercover" theory, but I am not employed by SPS. I am in fact a Russian web operative -- we were instructed to stay low on national electoral politics for a while, so I was reassigned to sow havoc in Seattle school board politics. And no, I will not "please refrain from stating" home truths. Now that the HCC Advisory Committee has announced its call for only one (1) new north end HCC high school pathway (in addition to Garfield and Ingraham IBX option), and (as I anticipated) the district staff have just published their plan for five (5) regional new HCC high school pathways, the Seattle School Board will have to decide between those visions. What is your own proposal?
HaHaHaha...sigh. @observer, I appreciate your boundless idealism, but where have you been these last few years? There is no consistency among HC schools now, or even among supposedly equivalent classes within a school. And this will suddenly change? Lawsuit? Hahaha...oh, just too much.
"Honors" classes for 9th and 10th, then Running Start for 11th and 12th? Yeah, the reality is that's possible, especially the more they fracture the cohort.
old timer