I Hate to Pile On But....
Remember how the Superintendent said there would be a community meeting about budget decisions? And it was made to sound more like an informational meeting than genuine engagement?
An email from the District was sent out yesterday about said community meeting.
I have seen this email and the details are on the meeting are:
The district is hosting an online event to learn more about the SPS budget on Monday, March 20th at 6 pm.
In this hour-long event, you will hear details about district budget planning strategies from district leaders and answers to frequently asked questions.
Complete and utter bullshit and already a communications failure.
They should just save the time and put up an FAQ at their website. I bet it'll be a 50 minute+ meeting with maybe two questions allowed and then "good night!" And hey, is anyone with children doing anything at 6 pm on a Monday? Yeah. Couldn't even make it later for parent convenience.
Folks, they do NOT care what you think.
They are NOT interested in YOUR ideas or thoughts.
Know what the Board was doing yesterday before the Board meeting? Having an Ad Hoc Committee meeting on....community engagement. I kid you not.
You need to vote out the ENTIRE Board majority in November.
Comments
Talk is cheap, as they've proven many times.
"We care about genuine engagement." = Genuine engagement is what we're the worst at.
"We care about African American males." = Educating AAM students is what we're worst at.
Oh, SPS...
Sure - but that won’t make the next group any better. That won’t make the classrooms better for kids, because this current group has done so much damage, and abdicated responsibility for the budget, and the glass palace has been spending amok for a decade, so the corrective action that’s really needed is the fail a levy.
We might disagree: voting out the entire board would not affect change. Booting them off,will not create positive change. We’ve had boards rotate multiple times before, and it doesn’t seem to matter much.
Only failing a levy is going to get anybody’s attention to let the muckety-mucks realize there’s “something rotten in Denmark”. Failing a Levy is the drastic message back to the district that they are failing us and we won’t take it anymore.
And no, the district is not failing because the district does not enough funding.
That’s what everybody likes to point to, cry that the state legislature is underfunding education, but that really misses the entire point that our SPS system is completely too top heavy with six figure salaries packed into the glass palace who come in and out on a revolving door. Sps is the entity that wastes dollar after dollar on pointless pet projects that don’t help kids.
We’ve had good boards, we’ve had insane boards, and in the end, it all keeps going in the wrong direction. The only thing that I think would get everybody on the same page and freak them out is if we failed a levy. That’s the only thing that’s going to make them pause and think about consequences.
In 2016, we had a majority of the board who were reasonable folks, we had Sue Peters and Rick Burke, we had leslie harris, who at that point was still workable, we had Scott Pinkham, who was reasonable and who connected with Sue and Rick, and we had Betty Patu, who trusted Sue, we also had jill geary and Steven Blanford, but again, we had a majority of the board who could do things that were in the best interest of children, yet even then, results were mixed as the super and staff actively worked against Sue and Rick, as they were still mad at Sue with Marty McLaren, who brought in Singapore math over their pet choice of curriculum. Staff held a grudge, and that’s why they went to implement an adoption cycle for elementary math when other curriculum adoptions were far more stale dated.
Even with a good board, staff still rides rough shot over the board and manages to usually get their way.
We haven’t had leadership that genuinely cared about kids in a long while. Nyland and Banada were focused on padding their retirements purely. The one before our current super, she was way out of her league, and looking to use this slot on her résumé as window dressing for bigger and better things, even possibly the White House. Susan Enfield might have been good, but rumor was she said she would not work with the school board president at the time who was from the central district.
We then had Bob Boucher as an interim super for like two weeks, he would’ve been a great leader, but he really did not want have anything to do with us.
So, by all means, vote them all out, for multiple good reasons, the most important of which is their abdication of budget oversight. But in the end, that won’t improve anything for kids or for fiscal responsibility.
I’ll sign off now, I know what I’m advocating for does not resonate and is never going to happen. The majority of seattle households are childless but support public education and vote yes on levees to show that support, and households with children, a significant portion won’t give their kids to the Sps system, but will happily give their money to the system. And the rest, I suppose, feel like they’re held hostage and have to vote the dollars to these clowns.
VOTE NO
It's starting to look like this Board answers to powers above it instead of its own constituents.
Keep the spotlight on that Council of Great City Schools.
SP