Seattle Schools Community Forum

Folks who watch school board meetings have probably heard students from The NOVA Project speak to the board about how their school is funded. You may wonder what the heck they are talking about. They are NOT talking about the 15% reduction in funding that the state grants to Alternative Learning Experience schools. This has nothing to do with decisions made at the state level. Instead, they are talking about how the District unfairly under-funds NOVA, along with The Center School and South Lake High School. The story is not hard to understand, but it it is tricky because it doesn't make any sense at all. Nearly every school in the district is funded through the Weighted Staffing Standards. There are, however, a few schools which are not. It might make sense to fund and staff schools like the Homeschool Resource Center, Interagency, and Middle College differently from the way that other schools are funded. They are not organized or structured like other schools. But if you were to...

From the Seattle Times : In an effort to show the public that state funding cuts hurt, Seattle Public Schools plans to shut down for one full day before school starts, and close school early on another day during the school year. Principals have agreed to take Aug. 31 as a furlough day, and the district announced Wednesday that it has reached a tentative agreement with teachers and other school staff to do the same, plus a half-day later in the year. The Aug. 31shutdown will be a few days before the school year starts on Sept. 7. It will affect training and other activities scheduled for that day. The district's enrollment office will be closed, too. Nearly all district staff will be gone, Harman said. The other half-day will occur sometime in January or February, and the union hopes to hold some kind of joint district-union activity in Olympia. Um, will anyone really notice? In Seattle, Harman said, "we did not feel that, given the reductions we've...

 Decision day for Lowell. A couple of interesting news stories about other area school districts and their budgets came across my desk. One is about Issaquah and how they recalled 35 of 36 laid-off teachers (the 36 declined to return) and avoided the pay cuts to teachers' salaries by the Legislature.  From the Sammamish Review story: District teachers have the opportunity to earn back the 1.9 percent decrease in the state-salary schedule through an increase in their Professional Growth Incentive Fund and 10 available professional-development hours. The measurement is the opposite of a furlough. Instead of working less for less pay, teachers will work more to keep their salaries stable. The money paying for the salaries comes from a variety of sources, including voter-approved increased levy dollars, operational efficiencies, decreased nonclassroom service levels — such as streamlined bus routes — utilization of reserve funds, increased fees and other sourc...

If you wish to speak on the Board agenda on Wednesday, the 6th, be sure to call 252-0040 and leave your name, phone number, e-mail address and topic you wish to speak on. The agenda has several interesting items of note.  one is a renewal of an agreement with Microsoft for software.   There is one puzzling item which I'm sure someone here can explain to me.  "Allows District staff access to the most current version of MS Office for home use."   Does that mean so they can take it home?  Work from home?   a huge item - approval of the budgets.   General Fund for $577,741,503; ASB for $4.4M; Debt Service fund for $85M and Capital Projects fund for $101M.  Adding all those up you get roughly $770M.  That's a lot of dough. Final vote on the attendance policy. The change I see is this: This motion has been discussed at the 5/23/2011 and 6/27/2011 meetings of the Curriculum & Instruction Policy Committee. On 5/236/27/2011, after ...

The Board is holding their prefunctory budget hearing as required by law. There's no sign up in advance. Just show up and add your name to the speakers list. Then, when your name is called, you can drop your words into the abyss. Just don't imagine that anything you say might have any kind of impact at all. What might you say? You might say something about all of the raises given out in the central office over the past few months. Raises for no clear reason. You might raise some questions about specific school budgets. For example: Why does STEM have just one assistant principal? Shouldn't it have two - one for each of the academies? Isn't that what the contract with NTN requires? Where in the STEM budget are the other things like the NTN subscription cost of $400,000 or the expense for the tech support professional with the $70,000 salary? I don't see them in this school budget. Why is the projected enrollment for Rainier Beach High School shown as 402 in...

Tuesday Joint Town Hall with the Superintendent and Mayor at South Shore K-8, 5:30-7:30 p.m.  (it's a two-hour event; I wonder how much of it will be Q&A.) Wednesday Public Hearing on the Budget from 4-5:00 p.m. at  headquarters.  You know folks, it IS worth your while to speak out and go on record.  Whatever your concern or unhappiness with the public, register it.  (I believe you can also send e-mails which will go into the record but I will check.) Thursday Operations Committee meeting from 4-6 p.m.  No agenda released yet. You'll note that I didn't put in the Last Day of School times.  That's because the district website reflects something different from what information I received directly from Communications.   Also, reviewing the information from Communications, it is unclear to me which day middle school is releasing on.  They have it listed on both June 21 and June 23rd. I'll check but the word in the "labels" is how I ...

 Updated 9:54 am From SPS Parent: Re: Attendance policy   (the vote postponed at the Board meeting) The reason given was that staff's going to take another look at the policy and submit a possible revised version for the next meeting.  Old policy New policy If you have problems with the new attendance policy, now is the time to make your voice heard.  Write to the Board, schoolboard@seattleschools.org . Or attend one of the last Director Community meetings of the school year. Peter Maier - 10:30 - noon - Bethany Community Church, main building Director DeBell has canceled his meeting. Also, the Budget book is available for light reading.  The public hearing for the 2011-2012 Budget is Wednesday, June 22 from 4-5 p.m. 

The Board Directors are busy attending high school graduations this week so the district is fairly light on meetings. There will be a Work Session with the topic "Strategic Plan Refresh" on Wednesday before the Board meeting . The Work Session is from 4-5:30 p.m. with the Board meeting starting at 6 p.m. There are no presentation materials yet available.

The Board is meeting this afternoon for a Budget work session. Here is a link to the agenda and to the handout . Interesting items: Levy Revenue: $15.1m. SEA CBA: $7.5, Purchase Textual Materials: $1.5m. So can it be said that the District is spending the money as promised? WSS Committee enhancements: $3.3m, WSS Reductions: $5.8m. Net impact on WSS spending -$2.5m Alternative Learning Experience: $1.2m For what? Transportation Potential Overruns: $3.1m, Transportation savings: $4.1m. The savings from the new transportation plan are just a bit more than the contingencies in case it doesn't work. STEM Analyst at Cleveland: $0.1m. Was this in the STEM budget? Strategic Plan Adjustments: $0.6m. Really? That's all we saved? Added Executive Director: $0.2m, Elminate 2nd principal at RBHS: $0.1m. I see no savings from the elimination of a 2nd principal at Bryant. Child Nutrition Services revenue: -$0.6m. How's that centralized kitchen working out for ya?

Monday Executive Session with the Superintendent and labor partners.  I suspect this is about the budget and the still-to-be closed $4M shortfall. Tuesday Audit and Finance Committee (Audit) from 4-6 p.m., agenda It looks like continuing audit response follow-ups as well as a VAX update, laptops at Cleveland and Pay for K.  There will also be an update on the search for a director for Internal Audit. Wednesday Executive Committee meeting , 8-10 am, agenda Review of upcoming Board meetings, government relations, capacity management, " planning interim superintendent's feedback next fall ", CFO/COO search updates, etc.   No way they are getting thru this huge agenda in two hours. Executive Session, 10-11 am - Superintendent evaluation Community Meeting with Director Sundquist from 11-12:30 p.m., Delridge Library* Work Session on the Budget - 4-5:30 p.m., no presentation or agenda posted yet. Thursday Audit and Finance Committee (Finance) from 4-6 ...

Not a big crowd for the School Board meeting last week but traffic was lousy and it's the end of the school year.

Executive Director Some readers have been doing some investigating and found a real puzzler:  how did Bree Dusseault get her job?  She doesn't meet the qualifications currently listed for someone to fill her old regional position: MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS: Education: Master’s degree in education or closely related field Experience: Five (5) or more years of successful experience as a Principal, Supervisor or District Administrator Preferred Qualifications : Demonstrated experience across grade spans (Pre-K - 12) She has one year of experience as a principal of a small charter middle school that had only 50 students and 5 teachers.    She claims to have been Founding Principal of New Orleans Charter Middle School but checking, it looks like the school was founded in 1998.  It was a good school until Hurricane Katrina wiped it out.  She re-opened it in 2007 and left at the end of the school year.    She has had three years experience ...

Back to school, kids. Monday Curriculum and Instruction Policy Committee meeting from 4-6 p.m.  The agenda includes: SEA tentative agreement on calendar (this may be about the shortened Mid-Winter break) textual materials adoption for high school science, social studies, middle school LA and elementary music anti-harassment policy and procedure promotion/retention policies homework policies credit/retrieval/summer opportunities Tuesday Latino College Night, a workshop to prepare students for college, 6-8:30 p.m., Rainier Beach High School.  Dinner is provided.  Workshop topics include: high school graduation requirements vs. college entrance requirements; post-secondary options; and funding post-secondary education. Wednesday Two School Board Work Sessions 4-5:30 p.m. - Budget 7-7:30 p.m. - Governance Policies

From a reader: We are organizing a letter-writing campaign on the counselors issue, since we have limited opportunities for public comment before the RIF. Basically, we are asking people to write letters to Dr. Enfield, cc'd to the Board, with two basic sentences: Our counselor has helped our child by ____. To pay for elementary counselors, I think we should cut ____. Please join the fray and forward to other parents who would be interested! Dr Enfield - saenfield@seattleschools.org School Board - schoolboard@seattleschools.org

I've been looking at the budget numbers from the District and they just don't look right. I'm not saying that they are definitely wrong, but I have some questions. For example... Each school I have checked so far has a lower expected enrollment than the current enrollment, but the District, as a whole, has a higher expected enrollment than the current enrollment. How does that work? It appears as if the District is intentionally under-funding schools. At the PTA meeting this week Director Sundquist said that over-funding a school was the worst sort of disaster. I guess he hasn't been in an under-funded school; that's no picnic either. It also puts the District in the worst possible situation for hiring if we're trying to bring on staff after October 1. There may not be anyone left but Teach for America corps members. (By the way, how are we going to hire any new teachers while we're laying off teachers who are already on the payroll?) Also: if the Dist...

At the PTSA Q&A event last night I spoke with the interim CFO, Robert Bousche, and he told me that he wanted folks to send him ideas for ways that the District could cut their budget. Steve Sundquist told me that the Board generally relies on the staff to recommend changes but that they could put in ideas of their own or ideas that they get from the public. So let's send Mr. Bousche and Mr. Sundquist some ideas. I can't find an email address for Mr. Bousche, so until we can get it, let's just send the ideas to Communications and to the superintendent and ask them to forward the idea to Mr. Bousche. Here are a couple ideas that I will be sending in today: * Stop the spending on the web site upgrade project. Savings: at least $400,000. * End the NTN contract with STEM a year early at one school (academy). Savings: $200,000.

I am going to attend the Seattle Council PTSA meeting tonight that features Dr. Enfield and our new CFO, Robert Boesche.   They will be answering school budgeting questions.  I want to say something to Mr. Boesche but I don't have a burning budgeting question. Throw out some to me and I'll try to ask as many as I can tonight.

Here is a link to the page with the school budgets. It also has a link to the Weighted Staffing Standards Model .

The district has posted a spreadsheet document for the budget.   It is quite large and very detailed and I have not plowed through it myself. One thing that did jump out at me was the amount of money we pay to private schools (roughly $300k).  I know there's a reason the district has to pay for students to attend them but it eludes me right now.  Can anyone jog my memory?

Meg Diaz wanted to let readers know that she did an analysis of personnel cuts from the last Work Session (2/9/11) on the budget. Her full report is at her blog , Dolce & Nutella . (Did you know that Costco sells Nutella in big jars a lot cheaper than anywhere else? But I digress.) Her basic points are good (I did a bit of cut-and-paste to put point together rather than spread out in her thread): When basic school and student funding is on the chopping block – and it is, since WSS cuts are being considered – then everything else needs to be up there as well. And if it's not, saying "it's grant-funded" isn't enough. There needs to be detailed transparency justifying the protection of that much administrative expense. However . Only 2/3 of Central Administration employees were even listed on the "core FTEs" handout (compared to 100% of Other Support). Central Administration cannot be effectively restructured when over 1/3rd of the organiza...