Seattle Schools Community Forum

From Erica C. Barnett (of C is for Crank): Tomorrow, the city council plans to fund nine new legislative assistants, one for each council member, bringing the total number of legislative assistant salaries for each office to four. (Council members can divide up those salaries however they want, for example by hiring multiple part-time aides, but council members' budgets will increase to add the new full-time equivalent position.)  The reason for the change, according to a staff report, is that council members have mor e work to do now that they represent districts, instead of the entire city. (This is the first council under the new system, in which seven council members represent geographic districts, and two are elected at large).  "The additional staff support provided by the new positions in this ordinance will be used to address the increased workload resulting from this switch to district elections," the staff report says. The legislation does...

As I had previously posted, there is a Work Session today with the Board.  The topic had been "Alternative Calendar" (along with a closed Executive Session) but the topic is now "Closing Opportunity Gaps."    The topic part of the Work Session is from 4:30-6:00 pm with the Executive Session after that. Looking at the presentation, it has the district-wide SBAC results on page 4. Good news - SPS did better than the state-wide results - across both ELA and Math - in every grade level, many times with a 10-point gap.   For 7th grade math, the gap was 12.4%.  Most of the scores were in the high 50s to low 60s. This is quite a difference with the MTSS scores from previous years.  Staff says it's because of "leadership," "teaming and collaboration," and "data/analytics."  They don't explain if this is at the district level or school level. But to the subgroups, there a slide...but no data.  Then, the presentation goes from a ...