Seattle Schools Community Forum

Tweet from SPS about an hour ago: Shelter in place: BF Day after reports of man w/knife outside school. No students involved or injured.  SPD investigating. The shelter in place was lifted about a half hour later. 

Good for the district; they are reporting that more than 500 people attended their Family and Community Engagement Symposium last Saturday.    Their account of it included some good photos. B.F. Day Elementary is redesigning its school playground and looking for input.  There will be a meeting on Tuesday, November 15th at 9:15 am with parents, staff and community to seek ideas.  Lowell APP students got very lucky with a visit from children's author (and member of the Decemberists), Colin Meloy.   What I thought was great is that he talked about the book, Wildwood, , did a Q&A and then asked them to imagine Discovery Park as a new setting for the book.  The kids came up with - what else? - Candy Country. 

From the Wallyhood blog (the blog of Wallingford where B.F. Day, JSIS and McDonald are located), a post on the school reports. The blog points out the differences in scoring between JSIS (a 4) and B.F. Day (a 2) as well as the number of free/reduced lunch students at B.F. Day versus JSIS. Here's an interesting stat from the blog entry: While many folks don’t think about B.F. Day as a Wallingford school since it sits on the other side of Aurora, last year 23% of B.F. Day’s students were from Wallingford, and that number more than doubled to 48% this year due to the New Student Assignment Plan. They also provide a link to an interesting study that I forgot about from 2000 of parent involvement at JSIS and its outcomes. What is fascinating is how quickly the comments got vicious (and it points out a big issue of how parents feel about their school versus the data on its performance). One parent spoke of how he/she felt that B.F. Day gets a bad rap versus JSIS when it comes to ...

There's a great program going on in several of our elementary schools called the Walking Bus, where families walk their children and other students to school. It's an effort to get kids more exercise, show them that walking is a viable way to get around and, of course, cut back on emissions. Nicole Brodeur of the Times had a column this morning about the program at Phinney Ridge which has been going on for 5 years (this one 10-year points out that that's half his life, very cute). I believe there are programs at Phinney Ridge, Lawton Elementary, Graham Hill, Sacajawea, Concord International and John Muir. Some schools do this every day and some, like John Muir, do a "Walking Wednesdays." I believe there is also a program in development at Roxhill Elementary. There is a group called "Feet First" that works to promote more walking in general. They have info there as well. We currently provide a Safe Routes to School program at John Muir and Concor...