Seattle Schools Community Forum

From Soup for Teachers: The Center School's Model United Nations team just won the prize for Best Large Delegation and nine Center School students won awards. There were 720 students at the conference from schools all over the Northwest, including lots of private schools, a number of which have MUN as a daily class. At Center, MUN is a student run group (with an amazing advisor teacher, Mr Bell) and is currently funded by parents. I'm putting up this notice from SPS but I would tell you not to bother.  The district is seeking members for the SPS Nutrition Services Policies Task Force .  I say don't bother because the district has ignored a very good report (that they paid for) put out earlier this year on the state of Nutrition Services in SPS and what could be done to make it better and continue successes in it.  Why have a taskforce when that work is already done?  As well, neither the Board nor the district ever act on taskforce recommendations so again,...

Update : KIRO is reporting that the district says about 5,000 students walked out.  As well, apparently other districts - Highline, Lake Washington are two - had student walkouts as well. End of update I received a press release this morning about the high school student walk-out.

Thursday, October 20th Operations Committee Meeting from 4:30-6:30 pm at JSCEE.  No agenda yet available. Again, I see that last Saturday, October 15th, there were four community meetings with directors and yet this week there are none.  It continues to puzzle me that the directors cannot try to space out meetings so that there is at least one per weekend.  To note: the Mayor and the Superintendent met to try to talk about a new high school at Seattle Center as the City thinks about revamping that area. 

Great story about Chief Sealth's water-bottle filling station from the West Seattle Blog . The CSIHS Green Team has been “recognized as a 2015-16 Conservation Champion for their work to get water-bottle-filling stations.  Not only did they get the green light to purchase filling stations at Chief Sealth, additionally they convinced the school board to pursue a $200,000 grant for filling stations in every single Seattle Public School.”

Entering the last month of this school year this week, always an exciting time. 

 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.

From Soup for Teachers: The Center School, an arts-based public choice school is under threat of losing fine arts classes due to budget constraints.  (Editor's note; if this happened, it fundamentally changes what this school was created to be. Website description of the school: The Center School (TCS or Center) is a small public high school with a focus on the arts and community engagement.) Tuesday, May 3rd at 9am students will be walking out of school (this will be an unexcused absence), over to Westlake, then taking the light rail to SPS in SODO. They will then protest and chant outside until someone comes to meet with them. Their goal is to let SPS know how upset they are with the budget and to demand action from the district to get all the fine arts classes back.  Parents are welcome and encouraged to join for any or all part of the walkout. Please share about it on social media and spread the word! Any press would be great.  Wednesday, May 4th...

From SPS Communications: Ingraham will hold a Saturday School  on May 30th from 8:30 – 11:30 AM , and Center School will hold a Saturday School  on June 6  (I believe similar hours to HIS but I’ll need to confirm). This is to ensure that all seniors have at least 175 instructional days while still allowing their scheduled graduation and graduation night events to take place. From the City of Seattle: Seattle Parks and Recreation has announced it will open and staff drop-in activities at 21 designated community centers for Seattle Public School students from kindergarten to 8th grade in response to the May 19 teacher walk-out. The free program will operate from 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday, May 19 and will include supervised recreation activities, with an anticipated supervision ratio of 20 children to 1 adult leader.

From SPS Communications: At Seattle Public Schools, it is our top priority to make sure each and every student is safe. When we have an incident like we did on Oct. 27, where a Center School student brought an incendiary device to school, it is important that we take the time to review how school and district staff respond to these incidents. While we conducted this review, we did place Principal Oksana Britsova on paid administrative leave. The review is now complete and concluded that there were no issues with how Principal Britsova handled the situation. She has returned to school today. However, our review led us to take a deeper look at our procedures and we are working on making some additional improvements in our security communications. Center School staff members have spent time debriefing the incident, and the school’s building leadership team met on Tuesday afternoon to revise the shelter-in-place protocol. Staff will be looking at other...

I am sorry to report that a third victim of the Marysville high school shooting has died.  She was 14-year old Shaylee Chuckulnaskit.  She died yesterday at the hospital.  One male victim, Andrew Fryberg, is still in critical condition.  The other male victim, Nate Hatch, is in satisfactory condition although he had to have surgery on his jaw with more operations to come.  In Center School news about their issue with a student bringing a Molotov cocktail to school, the story from the Times is disturbing.  New info:

On the Center School incident, one odd thing that I noticed yesterday when I received a press update: the principal has been replaced. 

I put up another update on the Center School incident yesterday.  It sounds like both staff and students did a great job in handling the situation. Fun fact: there are now only about 20+ schools where parents pay for kindergarten.   The district has managed, through LAP dollars and other funding, to fill in that half-day that the state doesn't pay for.  McCleary can't come fast enough.  I also note that the district has financial documents, like Race to the Top, that reference "in-kind" staff time "donations."   Keep this in mind around initiatives like RttT and preschool.  1B likes to say that SPS doesn't have to give space but I'm certain that any partnership will include a lot of staff time from several departments.  In-kind donations of staff time, whether dollars exchange hands or not, are REAL money. A reader had mentioned this previously but here's a list from OSPI of school bus violations statewide by drivers in cars.  Number of v...

The majority of high schools, comprehensive and alternative, will start at 7:50 am (ten minutes earlier than last year) and end at 2:20 pm.  This includes Cleveland STEM, World School and South Lake. The outliers are Center School (8:30 am-3:10 pm), Chief Sealth (8:40 am- 3:10 pm), Hale (8:40 am-3:10 pm) and Nova (8:30 am - 3:00 pm).  So Center School I get because of its location.  Sealth because it's a joint campus with Denny and the district promised to not have the middle school and high school kids come to school at the same time.  Nova?  Well, it is a project-based alternative school so I get that. But Hale? It lives a charmed life and has been able to keep their late start for years (and to this day).   (I personally have never seen any advocacy from Hale's administration for this kind of benefit for other high schools. ) Also, how is that it's okay for Nova, Hale and Sealth all to deliver 10 minutes less a day to students than other high sch...

RBHS Coding Team In support of teacher Jon Greenberg This thread will cover the last School Board meeting last Wednesday, Feb. 5th.  All directors were in attendance but Director Carr.  The Rainier Beach High School T.E.A.L. team (Technology Education and Literacy in Schools) gave a presentation on coding work they have been doing.  There was a large crowd primarily around transportation, former Center School teacher, Jon Greenberg and the NW Center Kids program. 

Second Update:  I erred in some of my reporting here.  As I told someone, sometimes I get a narrative in my head based upon what I know and forget that others might be starting from a  different place.  My apologies. Corrections: -  Policy 4260.  To understand, there are Board POLICES and Superintendent PROCEDURES, that mostly go hand in hand.  However, ONLY policies are voted on while the Superintendent just puts forth his procedure to enact said policy.  Naturally, it behooves the Superintendent to make sure they line up or have a plausible reasoning for why staff believes a policy should be enacted.  The Board was only voting on Policy 4260 which was to amend rental of school facilities.  This was vetted by quite a few people, including the SCPTA, and it's fine.  It passed. The issue, however, is that district legal staff inserted a paragraph into the Superintendent's procedure 4260 that would make after-school groups liab...

There's an article by Joel Connelly in the PI that there was some irony that one of the first acts of our new mayor, Ed Murray, was to go to see the Race exhibit at the Seattle Science Center.  (It has now ended.)   (Thanks to Johnny Calcagno for the heads up.) The irony is that just across the way at Seattle Center is Center School where Seattle Public Schools allowed one family to upend a vital conversation about race and privilege in one teacher's class. That teacher is Jon Greenberg. It is a great article and a great topic.  From the article:

At the Slog , they covered the mayor's award that The Center School received from the City's Human Services Coalition for student support of the race and social class at Center.  What is interesting to me is that Mayor McGinn stood very clearly on the side of the students and didn't mince words (bold theirs). Because it’s the mayor's award, it was given by Mayor McGinn himself and accompanied by a signed mayoral proclamation, which said that "Seattle is battling inequality in our schools" and "we need to have more discussion in our schools about race, not less." It concluded: "I applaud the Center School Community for their dedication and perseverance, and I agree with them that the Social Justice Curriculum should continue at The Center School ." One more big statement: A student said to the room: " We ask everyone in support of keeping this curriculum at Center School to come stand with us. " And the banquet tables em...

Update:   hadn't realized but the national parks are free this weekend so if you are thinking of getting out there, you're in luck. Tomorrow there is a community meeting with Director Carr starting at 8:30 am at Bethany Community Church. The Special Session of the Legislature is probably working thru the weekend towards its June 11th cut-off date.  What they passed has huge ramifications for our district and every other one in the state. Interestingly, on the Times' blog , there is this opinion from three of the editorial writers at the Times on the special session: Consider what’s in the best interest of the children who will make up Washington’s future work force. This means the Legislature should take a good look at its current budget breakdown and make full funding of education a top priority — 45 percent of general funds should be dedicated to K-12 public schools; 9 percent for higher education; and additional investments in early learning. Lawmakers...

Unbelievable.  Much those I wanted ALL our state legislators to get the budget done before the end of the Special Session next week, I did NOT want the Dems to give to the Reps and sure enough, they did.  And guess who is going to suffer?  Public schools. From Publicola : "At some point we had to make a move," state house finance chair Rep. Reuven Carlyle (D-36, Queen Anne) said today, explaining the compromise budget offer the state Democrats made to the Republican-controlled senate. Carlyle concluded: "Because that's how you govern. I hope there's a deal now. We'll see if they continue to be intransigent, but this is what you do to create movement."  So instead of asking for $1.3B for K-12, the Dems have scaled back to $700M.  That's $700M than is currently received so it falls in the "better than nothing" category but when you cut back to half of what you start with?  Not so much of a victory.  I have no idea how the Suprem...

The more we consider the situation with Contemporary Issues/World Literature, the 12th grade humanities class at The Center School, the more puzzling it becomes. While there are a number of missing details from the public record, the elements in the public record simply don't reconcile. We are told that the District is following some kind of process in response to a complaint, but the process they are following is not the complaint process. We are told that the complaint was about personnel, but the curriculum has been subjected to suspension and review. Nothing adds up, the people who should be involved have not stepped up, people who should not be involved are deeply involved, and none of the people who are supposed to oversee this mess are doing it.   If we break it down, then maybe we can make sense of it.