This and That, May 28, 2024

Just a couple of items.

One, tonight is the first "well-resourced"- school closure meeting at Roosevelt High School from 6-7:30 pm. Wish it was televised but I'll count on readers to chime in.

 

Two, also in the mix over the next 10 days are the Board's "Values and Vision" meetings for the next Strategic Plan. Here's a link with info including a SURVEY. 

The survey has five basic questions but not sure how they elicit "vision." Tepid and lame.

• How should we be able to describe a graduate of Seattle Public Schools?
• What should students in Seattle Public Schools know and be able to do?
• What does equity in education mean to you, and how should we measure it? 
• What's good about SPS or something working well for students that we should keep doing? 
• What is something that needs improvement in SPS to better support positive student outcomes?

 

Three,  the SCPTSA has weighed in on school closures. I find their messaging tedious. Clearly, they want to stay in good standing with the Board and Superintendent. What's odd is that I found it through someone's Twitterfeed and not at their website or their Twitterfeed or on Facebook. 

Here's what they (mostly) had to say. 

When clearly acting as individuals, people who are also PTA board members may advocate as their conscience directs. However, when advocating as/through PTAs, our mission requires us to center students at all times, with a particular emphasis on those who are most vulnerable. For PTAs, this means that in this moment, while we wait for additional information:

• We advocate not for or against school closures and consolidations in general, but rather for responsible and effective system-wide improvements to educational quality and equity for students in Seattle Public Schools, undertaken in a way that ensures that adults and not students bear the primary burden of any unavoidable disruption;

• We advocate not for or against the closure or consolidation of specific schools, but rather around the potential effects (positive and/or negative) of proposed changes on students, and especially on those who are most vulnerable;  

• We recognize that accurate data are critical to good decision making, and also that numerical data are susceptible to being weaponized and used unacceptably to tokenize students and communities. Storytelling is an extremely powerful advocacy tool that we can use to help our decision-makers truly understand how their decisions will impact our students.

• In order to be able to share authentic stories, we will work to understand who is in our communities and dedicate ourselves to genuine partnership with all in our communities, using resources such as National PTA’s Diversity Profile Template, Local Leader Guidance for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and other DEI resources provided by National PTA.

• If approached by media for comment, and we do not have an established media policy, we will refer to WA State PTA’s Ten Tips for Speaking With Media to ensure that our media interactions are mission-aligned.

• We ensure that, as membership organizations, we obtain the approval of our membership before making official position statements or joining non-PTA-led advocacy campaigns.

The only thing I see here is equity, equity, equity. That's important but is the SCPTSA saying that nothing else should matter in school closures? I again say that if the closures are done unevenly, it will only hurt the district.

Also, in bullet point two, there is NO way that school closures won't affect students in a primary way. 

I'm glad they are for data and I sure hope SCPTSA leadership attend tonight's meeting and call out the district if the data is vague or missing. 

I think storytelling (bullet three) is good but in the context of schools, there are many, many stories. How do we decide which ones count? (That's an honest question.) 

I am astonished that the SCPTSA admits they never wrote a media policy for its members. Fine if they want to use Washington State PTSA's policy but SCPTSA is the largest PTA in the state. I would have thought they might have their own.

That last bullet? A bit of a stretch there because SCPTSA does not go out and ask every single PTA to vote on any given item (unless something huge has changed). Let me know, if you are in your school's PTA membership, if there is electronic voting out there for these kinds of issues.