Seattle Schools Community Forum

One of our writers, Johnny Calcagno, mentioned this but I had to publish this account of the Stranger's Riya Bhattacharjee trying to ask the Superintendent a question at the State of the District meeting. It is classic and deserves a reprint her. (I find Riya to be one of the few reporters in this town who covers education willing to ask hard questions.) Here is her report (bold hers): "I had a rather awkward moment with Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson at her first State of the District address last night at Mercer Middle School. I'll get to that in a sec, first, the state of the district. Goodloe-Johnson admitted that "we haven't seen the results we want this year" (the district was able to meet only four of its 12 goals for 2013 under its five-year plan to increase student achievement), but she's confident we'll see them in the next few years. Taking a cue from the superintendent's speech about her core values ("account...

I hadn't posted about this before because,well, it fell off my radar at one point. But I'm going and while I'm pretty sure what I'll hear - a love fest for charters - I want to go and listen. Here's the info: On Monday, October 25 at 6 p.m., LEV will be hosting a panel discussion at the Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI) . There are three speakers on the panel: Richard Barth, CEO of KIPP Foundation, Timothy Daly, President of The New Teacher Project, and Steve Barr, Founder of Green Dot Public Schools. The discussion will be moderated by Adam Porsch of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Who are these guys? Richard Barth runs KIPP (a charter system, Knowledge is Power Program. He is married to Wendy Kopp who runs and started Teach for America. There are 99 schools in 20 states. KIPP is considered one of the better charter school systems although it is a more difficult model in that the schools start early and run late and have a longer school y...

Did anyone attend DeBell's or Sundquist's community meeting yesterday? I attended Harium's. I was quite surprised that it turned out to be just 3 parents. One was an Eastlake parent and one was a Hale parent. I would have thought from posts here that more parents had issues and questions especially about the NSAP. I first brought Harium up-to-date on the issue of me being able to ask questions at the press conference. (I had received an odd e-mail from Communications that was written for the press.) I asked Harium if the Board had a policy on media access. He said no and he didn't think they needed one but the district should have a procedure. I agreed. It seems apparent that the district has no policy and was flying by the seat of their pants with me and just made it up as they went along. I don't want to drag this out but I do want to make clear: The press conference started late even though all the speakers were there. I was told, five minutes befor...

Also in the Stranger Slog today (and kids, it is one of the most unusual, hilarious, thought-provoking and informative blogs around), a brief piece about what SEA has to say. As I previous reported (whoops, stated), SEA was NOT at the podium yesterday. The president, Olga Addae, was there but didn't speak because of communications issues with the district and also SEA's feeling that they didn't want to speak on the contract until the Board voted on it (which wasn't happening until later that night). The Slog reports that: Sure, the teachers' union, the Seattle Education Association, approved it, but SEA President Olga Addae lashed out at the school board after a press conference ( .pdf ) yesterday for ignoring the union's vote of no confidence on district superintendent Maria Goodloe Johnson. (The union had voted no confidence just minutes after approving the new contract on Sept 2). "While you lauded collaboration, you ignored the no confidence vo...

It's a rather light agenda for this week's School Board meeting and, in fact, I'd bet this one gets done in under two hours. It's mostly pro forma work. they will be approving a " Capital Asset Preservation Program " as required by OSPI. This will create a plan for each school built after 1996 to protect it. The district must do this to continue to receive state funding for capital projects. There are also a couple of "placeholder" items for district construction at Ingraham and for school construction bonds. The most interesting item are the new Board policies on " Fees for Damage " and " Restitution ". The Board is going from a one-line policy (based on requirements from an RCW about fees for damage to school property) to two full policies on this issue. The district will require a deposit on some items and anything lost, stolen or unreturned will be charged at full cost to the student/parent or guardian. Basically, ...

As you may have noticed from the tv ads, school is going to start up soon in some areas of the country. Here, SPS will be starting up again on September 8th. (Although the Board calendar shows that Hawthorne and West Seattle Elementaries will start on August 31st.) We won't see the Board in action again until the August 18th Board meeting. That should definitely be interesting as I would expect them to say something, anything about the audit report. There will be many Board committee meetings this month but no Board member district meetings. (There is one Board workshop this month about Families and Education levy and budget goals.) I think one of the best places to hear the Board hash out the coming year will be at the Board retreat on September 11th. But it sure has gotten heated over at Harium Martin-Morris' blog on the issue of the audit. Harium asks one anonymous person to watch their tone (and I would agree). Don't ever post in anger even if you are angry...

Two Seattle education stories from the Times appeared over the last couple of days. One is about the number of Washington state school districts that are going to take advantage of the lifting of the levy lid by the Legislature . Some levies will be in August and some in November. Everett, Edmonds, Northshore and Marysville will each have one in August. Bellevue and Tacoma say they aren't because they aren't sure how voters will respond. SPS says it has "no choice" because the state isn't supporting education the way it should. (On that point I have heard legislators say, for many, many years, that they did not want to give more money to Seattle schools because of what they hear about the district. Michael DeBell acknowledged this as a problem several years back. When the Legislature doesn't feel the oversight/management is there and there are results to point to that trend upward, it does make a lot of people unwilling to listen. This is a key poi...

Tomorrow is the sign-up day for speaking at Wednesday's School Board meeting. You can either call 252-0040 or e-mail the Board office, boardagenda@seattleschools.org. As previously noted, there will be a rally at the John Stanford Center at 5:30 pm prior to the Board meeting to voice concerns over over superintendent, Maria Goodloe-Johnson. If you are not coming to the rally or Board meeting, I urge you to write to the Board with your opinion/thoughts about Dr. Goodloe-Johnson's abilities to guide and lead SPS. The agenda has some interesting items: a resolution for the $48M supplemental operations levy to be put on the ballot in November. I had written about this in depth previously so I won't go into again. The cost to the district is $525k but they are hoping that would go lower if more items get on the ballot. One thing, though, is that there is language in here both specific on its uses and vague on its uses depending on the year. The first year 2010-2011 is...

I did not attend the Board meeting but did watch some of it from home. (I taped it but naturally got the wrong station for the first 30 minutes.) I only got the tail end of the public comment period. But there were two interesting comments. One was by Jane Fellner who is a long-time parent advocate in this district. She was telling the Board that Garfield is going to be overloaded next fall. She had looked at the enrollment data and they are getting 200 more students than the functional capacity. She said that Garfield would love to share its program with as many students as possible but that truly, the building does have a capacity. (This got commented on later. See Board member updates below.) Another was the ever-smart Meg Diaz who, once again, made an impact. (And Meg, help me out here to flesh out what you said.) What really stuck with me is her determination to make the Board understand that Central Administration has not cut back all that much and the data proves he...

( Update : This story appeared in today's online PI, complete with quotes from Dr. Goodloe-Johnson. I would assume this $6M gap is valid but I think all will be revealed at tonight's budget meeting at Roosevelt at 6:30 p.m.) The PI reports (and I use that word loosely because they again are using a UW journalism student to be their reporter) that after the district got the numbers from the Legislature, the district's budget is $6M more in the whole. This is in addition to the $25M already cut. I have to say I am quite torn about going to the Alliance Teacher Town Hall tonight or the budget meeting at Roosevelt. Anyone planning on going to the budget meeting who might report back? The budget meetings were about trying to explain the budget process and get feedback for next year's projected cuts at $24M but I suspect now they will ask what to do about this additional $6M. (Note: the district now says these meetings are to talk about the budget gap for this year b...

I attended the joint meeting yesterday morning. There were a handful of other interested people including Ramona Hattendorf, the Seattle Council PTSA President. The entire City Council was there except Sally Clark and the entire School Board was there except for Michael DeBell. The Superintendent was also in attendance. As I mentioned elsewhere, I saw Tracy Libros, head of Enrollment, before the meeting started and asked her about the district decision to enlarge the enrollment at both Ballard and Roosevelt. I asked her how many students that might be. She said up to 25% of the functional capacity of each school except if the school did fill with attendance area students, they would need to keep the 10% Open Choice seats. A bit confusing but I'm sure it will all become clear by the end of May. I had forgotten that all City Council meetings have a public comment portion at the beginning so I did get up and speak. I just told the Council that as someone active in the distric...

Randy Dorn, the Superintendent for OSPI, was arrested for drunk driving early Sunday morning. He has not yet been charged by the Orting city prosecutor. Here's the article from the Times. After his arrest early Sunday for alleged drunken driving, Dorn said he hopes the public understands it's a private, legal matter that he can't yet discuss. But when he can — and if he's convicted — some say his political survival will depend a great deal on what he says, and how he says it. I honestly don't know how I would feel about a conviction. Is it possible he could go to jail, even briefly, for a guilty DUI verdict? What would this say to teens? Reactions? On Monday afternoon, Gov. Chris Gregoire called the arrest a "very unfortunate circumstance. "My heart goes out to him," she said, "and thank goodness, nothing happened." When asked whether it could imperil his ability to do his job, Gregoire said: "I leave that up to him....