Seattle Schools Community Forum

The Superintendent put out a rather bland assessment of the issues of the teacher contract negotiations.  I say bland not because the issues he states aren't important - they are - but there is nothing new to see here with a few exceptions.

Quite an interesting and packed agenda for the Audit and Finance Committee meeting on Thursday.  (It's also interesting that the Executive Ctm meeting, normally in the morning, is at the exact same time so it won't be possible to attend both.) Items of interest : Washington State Auditor’s Office Entrance Conference (Technow)  Always interesting to hear from the Auditor.

To start, I think that foreign language teaching is great and should be started in every elementary school. I would advocate for foreign language several times a week in every elementary versus what we have now which are four foreign language immersion elementary schools that are ONLY open to neighborhood children. I did a previous post on this subject that covers some of the history. JSIS started as a Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "hey kids, let's open a foreign language school to honor a beloved superintendent." But, where was the discussion about funding, where those kids go AFTER elementary and how to expand the program? Nowhere.   Guess what? John Stanford International School was a wild success and left other parents clamoring for more. It took the district nearly eight years to bring a couple more schools on-line and then McDonald in the last couple of years. (They did also finally get around to figuring out a pathway to middle and high school although those...

I had nearly forgotten that I had received a reply from Director Carr on the issue of the district considering partial funding for the IAs at McDonald for next year (despite the district saying previously that they weren't and it wasn't necessary to have IAs to have the program). I want to say upfront - the district created this program and after having sat through the Board Work Session on International Schools, I absolutely see the need for the IAs.  If the district wants the program to work, best practices would say have an IA in every room. However, there are two points to consider here. The main one is that that despite the popularity of the programs and the desire by many parents for access to them, they are ONLY available to children in certain neighborhoods.   This is not the fault of the parents but they also need to understand that they are getting something that other students have no access to.  And they need to understand that their program costs more ...