Seattle Schools Community Forum

 GiveBIG has been extended to midnight tonight because of technical difficulties yesterday.  Please consider giving so that your donation gets stretched from their giving fund. Have you been keeping up with the story on Bellevue High school and their football team ?  Long story short, they became a football powerhouse when they hired a new coach around 2000.  The team has won multiple state titles since then.  But their school board heard rumors of improprieties and hired two lawyers to investigate. The main issue is students who don't live in their district being on the team as well as some of them not even attending the school and being at some off-site non-Bellevue district diploma mill program. And, Bellevue High had many more transfers of students who ended up playing football there than other high schools in the district.

Judge George Finkle decided that the district's decision to dismiss Garfield choir teacher Carol Burton for procedure violations during a choir field trip to New Orleans was excessive. See the Seattle Times article here .

There's a story in the Seattle Times about Carol Burton, who lost her job for violating field trip procedures. The story outlines her argument but it leaves out her best one: when other teachers violated field trip procedures - in worse ways with worse consequences - they were not disciplined at all.

I like to listen to KUOW's Friday morning round-up of news.  It's generally lively and interesting. I only caught part of this morning's but the part I caught really bothered me because of what I heard. The discussion was about the alleged cheating by the Bellevue High football staff who were running a "diploma mill" for students they recruited for the football team.  It is alleged that those students were attending a private school that was being paid for by team boosters or someone else.  It does not appear the students went to real classes or even had teachers all the time.  Bellevue has had a winning football program for many years with, at one time, a 67-game winning streak. The pundits were asked about what should happen to the Bellevue program, given that Bellevue had won games with these students playing. ( I note KUOW also had the H.G. Bissinger, noted author of Friday Night Lights, about Texas high school football).  So in jumps Joni Balter who...

Reader Lynn sent me the link from the Times with this announcement.

I am troubled by my dilemma of putting a link to the Investigation report and/or naming the chaperones and their statements to the investigator.  I know these are public documents but it does give me pause.  However, someone already put a link to the report so I will as well.  Report document.   If you do read it, understand that "identifier" means the private school - which we all believe to be Blanchet High School - "student 1" is the male student in question and students 8 and 9 are the girls who were groped.  None of the students nor the male student's mother is named.  All of the chaperones are named.

 Update:   according to a comment in this thread, this rally is timed for when Ms. Burton is meeting with Dr. Nyland today. I have requested the District's investigation report and was told I could have it on June 22nd. The District put out a press release on the report right as the Garfield students and Friend of Garfield Choir were rising up to support Ms. Burton.  A tease of a press release is NOT the full report and to act as though everyone should go "oh well, never mind, move along, nothing to see here" is a wrong assumption on the part of the District.