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Brandon Hersey is new D7 Director
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The vote was 4-2 with Geary and Pinkham voting for Emijah Smith.
I’ll post more on what was said later.
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Comments
Anonymous said…
This is despite what was evidently overwhelming parent support for the other candidate. Interesting. I'd like to hear rationale for the choice that ignores parents.
Concerned Parent
Anonymous said…
Concerned parent, where is the evidence of this overwhelming support? Phone calls? Emails? Not everyone can make a public meeting.
Fed Up
Anonymous said…
@concerned parent
This blog isn't representative of district parents, either.
Enough
Anonymous said…
The district with the population that struggles the most gets the youngest and least experienced candidate, with little knowledge of the district.
More noise please
Anonymous said…
Are you talking about the candidate who got no votes? Maybe that type of experience wasn't what the were looking for.
Concerned Parent, you need to be clearer in your comment. Who is the one with "overwhelming parent support?" Also, how do you know that?
ALL of you need to be clear about who you are talking about.
D7 Parent said…
The district had a form for people to register their "vote" as well as forms at all the candidate forums to fill out. They did not (to my knowledge) reach out to immigrant community groups in D7 to help spread the word which was a huge oversight. This process has been pretty brutal for all the candidates. It would have been so much better to have had an election. I hope the board has learned something from it, but from my perspective it wasn't worth it.
Anonymous said…
This board lacks a brain and a spine. They brought in Amplify. They failed to vote in Ms. Van Arcken. Says a lot about their priorities.
Clearly, they prioritize optics. And the district 7 replacement kangaroo court is/was also only about OPTICS, not excellence. Not about scaffolding kids and communities to higher achievement.
Julie Van Arcken got twice as many public ‘votes’ as the next highest candidate. Fact. But, this was not an election, and an electronic survey is not a substitute for a properly processed ballot box. But still.... she got twice as many votes. But that counts for nothing. In the end, the board went with optics. So, what (who) the public overwhelmingly wanted, at least per SPS’s own tool to gather that feedback, they ignored. Rather typical.
Hopeless.
Anonymous said…
@ D7 Parent:
I sure hope you are not holding the Board responsible for there not having been an election.
-- Ivan Weiss
Anonymous said…
"Julie Van Arcken got twice as many public ‘votes’ as the next highest candidate."
You've got to be kidding if you think that was a measure of the public. It was a vote of the well-connected.
Get Real
Anonymous said…
They don’t need another HCC proponent of stratified education. That’s what we’re moving away from. The focus is African American males, and now we have a highly qualified one. We don’t need a do gooder special interest panderer. And we don’t need someone who has already dragged down the PTSA, with a quasi criminal record as a bonus. The choice was correct, and obvious.
Get Overit
Anonymous said…
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
The speaker list is up for the Board meeting tomorrow; not as packed as I thought with just four people on the waitlist. The majority of the speakers are speaking on high school boundaries (with several wanting to talk about Ballard High). There are only three of us speaking about the Green Dot resolution asking the City to not grant the zoning departures that Green Dot has requested. It's me, long-time watchdog, Chris Jackins, and the head of the Washington State Charter Schools Association, Patrick D'Amelio. (I knew Mr. D'Amelio when he headed the Alliance for Education and Big Brothers and Big Sisters; he's a stand-up guy.)
Update 2: an absolutely fabulous interactive map made by parent Beth Day (@thebethocracy on Twitter - she covers Board meetings and is fun to read). end of update Update 1: Mea culpa, I did indeed get Decatur and Thornton Creek mixed up. Thanks to all for the correction. end of update I suspect some who read this post will be irate. Why do this? Because the district seems very hellbent on this effort with no oversight skid marks from the Board. To clearly state - I do not believe that closing 20 schools is a good idea. I think they hit on 20 because they thought it might bring in the most savings. But the jury is still out on the savings because the district has not shown its work nor its data. I suspect closing schools and THEN leasing/renting them is the big plan but that means the district really has to keep the buildings up. But this district, with its happy talk about "well-resourced schools" is NOT acknowledging the pain and yes, grief, that is to come fro
Update 2: So I have seen a message from President Liza Rankin on why she, Director Evan Briggs, and Director Michelle Sarju backed out of this meeting. In a nutshell: - She says there was no organization to the meeting which is just not true. They had a moderator lined up and naturally the board members could have set parameters for what to discuss, length of meeting, etc. All that was fleshed out. - She also claimed that if the meeting was PTA sponsored, they needed to have liability insurance to use the school space. Hello? PTAs use school space all the time and know they have to have this insurance. - She seems to be worried about the Open Public Meetings law. Look, if she has a meeting in a school building on a non-personnel topic, it should be an open meeting. It appears that Rankin is trying, over and over, to narrow the window of access that parents have to Board members. She even says in her message - "...with decisions made in public." Hmmm - She also says that th
Comments
Concerned Parent
Fed Up
This blog isn't representative of district parents, either.
Enough
More noise please
Enough
ALL of you need to be clear about who you are talking about.
This process has been pretty brutal for all the candidates. It would have been so much better to have had an election. I hope the board has learned something from it, but from my perspective it wasn't worth it.
Clearly, they prioritize optics. And the district 7 replacement kangaroo court is/was also only about OPTICS, not excellence. Not about scaffolding kids and communities to higher achievement.
Julie Van Arcken got twice as many public ‘votes’ as the next highest candidate. Fact. But, this was not an election, and an electronic survey is not a substitute for a properly processed ballot box. But still.... she got twice as many votes. But that counts for nothing. In the end, the board went with optics. So, what (who) the public overwhelmingly wanted, at least per SPS’s own tool to gather that feedback, they ignored. Rather typical.
Hopeless.
I sure hope you are not holding the Board responsible for there not having been an election.
-- Ivan Weiss
You've got to be kidding if you think that was a measure of the public. It was a vote of the well-connected.
Get Real
Get Overit