Seattle Schools Community Forum

Checking the Board's webpage, as I often do, I find that the Work Session on HR has been stripped down because.... Closed Session, per RCW 42.30.140, and Executive Session: Potential Litigation, Evaluate the Performance of a Public Employee

Tuesday, April 29th This date sees two Work Sessions ; both closed.  They run from 4:30-7:30 pm.  I am a bit puzzled by these as the calendar notation has one about HR and is an open session and the other as a closed Executive Session.  But I went to the agenda and now both are notated as "Closed" sessions.  I thought an Executive Session was always closed any way and also why are both now closed? The HR presentation is still linked. 

I went to the Board meeting two weeks ago and a couple of Work Sessions/Committee meetings.   This thread is the Board meeting and Operations Ctm. meeting. Here are the highlights: Board Meeting This was the one where the high school basketball teams were honored.  Very fun to be there (although the Garfield boys wanted to look as serious as possible).  Paul Apostle of HR said they were making "exceptional" progress to hire early in hard-to -fill posts like Sped and ELL.  There was a bit of mention for Genesee Hill which is now running about $2M behind.  As Chris Jackins pointed out, just looking at the site, you can see potential problems.  I'm not sure why this wasn't apparent sooner.  The later start for secondary schools had about 3800 signatures by then. One lone NW Center father spoke about the issue of where their program will end up.  He did say they didn't want to stay but that the district should "own" what they did in...

Action expresses priorities . - Ghandi I never worry about action but only inaction . - Churchhill Inaction breeds doubt and fear.  Action breeds confidence and courage.  If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it.  Go out and get busy.   - Dale Carnegie The time for action is now.  It's never too late to do something. - Antoine de Saint-Exupery What's with all these inspirational quotes?  To inspire you to realize that the time is now to stand up and do something about Seattle Public Schools.  You do this, of course, for your own child(ren) to make sure that their school is the best it can be and that you feel confident in the education they are receiving.   But, if public education is (as I believe it is) the backbone of our great country, you must do this for all public school children.  YOUR school is really only as good as ALL schools in the system.  

From SPS Communications and Superintendent Banda: I’m very pleased to announce that Kenneth Gotsch has been hired as Assistant Superintendent for Business and Finance. He brings extensive experience to the district and will join us  on December 2 , filling the position vacated by Duggan Harman. As Assistant Superintendent for Business and Finance, Mr. Gotsch will provide leadership and expertise in financial management and in the business and finance operations of the district. He is responsible for ensuring an effective management and budget system is in place to support schools. Reporting directly to the Superintendent, Mr. Gotsch will oversee the departments of finance (Budget, Payroll, Grants, Accounting, Purchasing, Contracts) and audit response, as well as provide leadership for financial matters related to Human Resources (Employee/Labor Relations, Compensation and Benefits, Substitute Services, Employment, Employee Assistance Program, Leadership Development and the ...

After the abysmal issues at Ballard and Roosevelt, this is good news (from Mirmac 1): "...we now have new guidelines for hiring athletic coaches. We are now required to have a parent and student on the interview committee when we interview coaches. If you would like to participate on an interview committee please fill out the following form and submit it. We will be hiring a Girls Soccer and Ultimate Frisbee coaches the last week of August." I believe this is for Mirmac's school but I suspect this is a district directive.  If your school is hiring a new coach and you want to be part of the hiring, ask your principal about it.

There are sometimes days doing this watchdog work that are defeating, sad and frustrating.  Today is one those.  I'll get to the issue at hand but a few thoughts first. I've said this before - I do truly believe we have some good and decent people working in SPS.  There are several up the food chain who are almost great but, like many a bureaucracy, have those whose work either drags them down or mires them in place. I've also said this before - anyone who works in leadership at SPS who does not read and heed the words in the Moss-Adams report of 2002 is doomed to failure.  Or, at least doomed to frustration. The echo in my head from that brilliant report (and I paraphrase here) -   It does not matter what structural or systemic change you bring to an institution, if the culture of bureaucracy at an institution does not change, nothing changes. This has been, and continues to be, the problem with our district. You really need someone at the top ...

Following up on Charlie's thread to the new (waiting for Board approval) five-year Strategic Plan , here's what I heard from the Board retreat where the Board and senior staff discussed it.  For some reason, only the goals are at the communications page on this issue but there are links to the v ision/mission/core beliefs from the Intro item on the Board agenda page.  To note: that Saturday, June 1st, saw a packed room of staff (most of whom stayed from 10 am to 2 p.m. - a big commitment of time) and Board members. Everyone came prepared to work and was in good spirits.  There was a feeling of a shared unity to this work.  Once again the Alliance person sat at the table with Board and staff.  One funny aside is that I downloaded the agenda from the district's website.  It had only the district logo but when you got to the meeting, the agenda had both the district's and the Alliance's.  Just in case anyone thought the Alliance was just a helper at t...

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...

There are not further details/information on the Hamilton substitute incident that occurred last week as the investigation is on-going.   SPS replied to these basic questions about substitute hiring. 1) Why did the reporter say the sub wasn't employed by the district? Is that right? We did not tell the reporter that the substitute wasn’t a district employee. We did say that because he isn’t a permanent teacher, he couldn’t be placed on leave. Instead, we would not give him any more assignments until the investigation was completed.

Let's start with pro arguments: - on speaker was yet another ex-TFAer, Timothy Schlosser who is now a TFA teaching coach.   (I asked one SPS teacher about being a coach after maybe 3-5 years in the classroom and he laughed.  That does seem a short period of time to become a coach.  But maybe not a TFA coach.) But he was also the former TFAer that I quoted in my testimony and here's what he said in 2008 to an LA Times columnist about his first year of teaching: "My students deserved more than I was able to deliver.  That's a year lost they can't recoup. I still feel bad that I wasn't better." Take that in.