Seattle Schools Community Forum

Roosevelt High School's Jazz Band placed third at this weekend's Essentially Ellington competition in NYC.  Congrats to all! Ballard High students in their video program won two major prizes at the Dominique Dunne Film Competition in Colorado Springs.  The competition only awards four prizes and the judges are a who's who in Hollywood  so this is huge honor for Ballard.  Good job!  Pinehurst K-8 is circulating a petition about their proposed relocation to Broadview-Thompson. From the petition: Pinehurst K-8 at Broadview-Thompson provides the district with a much-needed Option School in the northwest area.  As Pinehurst K-8 community members, we consider these requests to be reasonable for the success of the co-location: • That we retain our principal, administrative staff, and instructional staff to ensure stability for our entire community during the transition; for initial negotiations with Broadview-Thompson staff regarding scheduling...

South Shore PreK-8 came up as a topic during a discussion over conversion charters .  I, like many, believe it would be a target (a willing one) for a conversion takeover.  I suspect you could get the parents or teachers to agree and I'm sure LEV, who now directs the foundation money that South Shore gets, would also be agreeable.  That leaves the community and the district that may not like the idea of losing a $73M building to a charter entity. One thing to keep in mind - ALL charters are their own districts .  If they take over a district building, they can decide the parameters - within the law - of public use just as SPS does.  If you use a school building for your local community meetings or Boy Scouts, you might have to find someplace else to go.  I also don't know what it would mean for the joint-use agreement that SPS has with Parks for SPS playfields.  I would assume if a charter group takes over the building and its grounds and is its ...

Before going over what was discussed line-for-line, I wanted to throw out some items that popped out to me as ah ha! or oddities or questions. One thing to point out off the bat - and please help me out if you know for certain - is that on the sheet entitled "SPS 2011-12 (Gap) Estimate Summary" (bundled in a group of documents) was a total list of losses from the state. It STILL has Highly Capable as eliminated. I thought that got put back by both the House and Senate. They budget in about $1.16M to reopen Rainier View, Viewlands and McDonald/QA. I had forgotten that basically McDonald and QA will have TWO opening costs because they are first in Lincoln and then go to their own buildings this fall. Interestingly, I hear that Broadview-Thompson could handle Viewlands for another year so maybe the district could consider waiting one more year and save that money. STEM update - $100k. Look for that to be on-going. STEM came along at a time when the district really di...