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Stopping by Hale High on a Hot August Night
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Hey, look who was at tonight’s Seattle Schools community meeting at Nathan Hale High School.
More info to come - it was a good meeting.
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Awesome said…
Great to see you attending SPS meetings!
Anonymous said…
Welcome back to Seattle - no where more beautiful than Seattle in the summer - and hate to say it but certainly better than Tucson in the summer :-)
Welcome back! Sorry we couldn't have arranged milder weather for you.
Anonymous said…
Thanks for the photo, memes incoming!
LOL
Anonymous said…
I’ll be interested in you and others’ responses to these meetings. They seem set up well enough, with professional and courteous staff and conversation facilitators. Several participants at my table voiced concern about the sunsetting of advanced learning without any replacement, and the problems of curricula like Amplify that have a low floor and even lower ceiling. But my overall sense is that advanced learning or differentiated instruction of any sort is a low, low priority. Leaves me resigned to either supplementary homeschool or look to other school districts, and saying a prayer for the academically gifted children far from educational justice who might want extra enrichment and accelerated learning!
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
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BLUE SKY
LOL
SPS parent