Seattle Schools Community Forum

The Executive Committee Meeting meets today at 4:30 pm.  Here's the agenda with two very important items - the partnership agreement with the City about their Seattle Preschool Program and Charles Wright's $1M+ Start of School Transformation Project.   The agenda also includes the draft Board meetings' agendas for the next month.   The May 20th agenda is a huge slog of capital projects but also includes review of the Covenant Agreement of Sale for MLK to FAME, RTTT funding for more " community-school partnerships," an OSPI Math/Science grant for middle school science for $1.5M and, of course, buying more portables.  It also has the introduction of the Seattle Preschool Program Partnership agreement.  (Please note that for the draft agenda, not all items are live-linked.) The June 3rd agenda has the approval of the SPP partnership and RTTT funds as well as introduction of an item "Research Activity and Test Administration Procedure" (I'm th...

 (I have very mixed feelings about these appointments.  Both men have good education skills.  Mr. Wright is the more worrisome of the two.  He has close ties with the Gates Foundation. He got onto the board of the Alliance for Education just nine months after he moved to Seattle a couple of years back.  That's something of a record for the Alliance to put him on their Board.  His resume shows that he has been something of a job hopper and frankly, I doubt he'll stick around longer than a year or two.  He looks like a real data guy and, for our concerns about student privacy data, he may be a key player to convince in order to protect those privacy rights. Mr. Herndon, like Superintendent Banda, comes from a small district where, according to the bio, they just passed their first (!) capital levy.  The enormity of the facilities and capital issues in SPS may look like a tidal wave to him.  On the other hand, he seems to support alternative...