This and That, November 27, 2023

The Portland, Oregon teachers strike is over after a long three weeks. From the NYTimes:

The strike has drawn attention to public school funding in Oregon. While unions in other industries have recently secured major wins, taking advantage of profits of Hollywood studios and Detroit’s large automakers, Portland Public Schools said repeatedly that its budget was limited by state education funding, an assertion that was at least partly supported by state fiscal analysts. And the district has said that it will have to find more than $100 million in cuts to afford the contract, The Oregonian reported.

Uh oh, same as Seattle.

From the Seattle Times:

One person is hospitalized and another has been arrested after a shooting in the 1400 block of Northwest 67th Street, the Seattle Police Department said on the social media platform X.

Ballard High School is within that block, though police did not specify in its posts, published early Sunday afternoon, whether the reported shooting took place there.

SPD arrested one suspect.

This is so troubling because in the early '90s, a female Ballard High student was shot to death in a drive-by shooting. The 16-year old shooter was caught and is serving 50 years in prison. This shooting drove many parents away from Ballard High.

But when Ballard High got a complete building renovation, several years later, parents came back.

Also from the Seattle Times, a story on what to do with land at Fort Lawton that the City is eligible to use:
 

Four and a half years after Seattle approved a roughly $90 million plan to convert surplus military land at Fort Lawton into affordable housing and park space, the project has yet to break ground, the cost estimate has passed $160 million and the city is rethinking how to proceed, if at all.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which must sign off on the transfer of the property for housing, is anxious to make a determination on the city’s application and has raised concerns about the development timeline for the homes. After multiple extensions, HUD has given Mayor Bruce Harrell a late-December deadline to sort things out.

I bring this up because the City's plan included this agreement between the City and SPS, signed in 2017:

The City of Seattle has also agreed to work with Seattle Public Schools (SPS) on an opportunity for SPS to own a portion of the property dedicated to active park uses. The agreement can be viewed here. PS would also conduct public outreach and engagement in coordination with the City of Seattle once funding for development is identified.

Gotta say that at this point, with SPS in dire financial straits, any new school in Magnolia is highly unlikely.

And the word of the year according to the Merriam-Webster is....authentic. From the AP:

Sokolowski and his team don’t delve into the reasons people head for dictionaries and websites in search of specific words. Rather, they chase the data on lookup spikes and world events that correlate. This time around, there was no particularly huge boost at any given time but a constancy to the increased interest in “authentic.”

“Can we trust whether a student wrote this paper? Can we trust whether a politician made this statement? We don’t always trust what we see anymore,” Sokolowski said. “We sometimes don’t believe our own eyes or our own ears. We are now recognizing that authenticity is a performance itself.”

The other top words for 2023 (I knew all of them except this one):

RIZZ: It’s slang for “romantic appeal or charm” and seemingly short for charisma. Merriam-Webster added the word to its online dictionary in September and it’s been among the top lookups since, Sokolowski said.

The others were kibbutz, implode, deadname, doppelganger, coronation, deepfake, dystopian, and covenant.