Seattle Schools Community Forum

Update:  Father of autistic kid Gorsuch ruled against will testify to Senate against his nomination. end of update From NPR: School districts must provide students with disabilities the chance to make meaningful, "appropriately ambitious" progress, the Supreme Court said today in an 8-0 ruling.

From Ed Week , New York State lifts disciplinary action against teachers who discuss test questions that the state has released. A reader asked about a threat at Ingraham High School in the cafeteria by a student with a backpack.  A staffer asked around and not a single student knows about this.  In this day of phones with cameras and social media, that would seem odd.  I'm thinking someone was trying to stir the pot here.  Don't do that. Last spring, Mayor Murray had his Education Summit.  I was there as were hundreds of other people.  He said this about homeless students in SPS (transcript from the Mayor's office, dated April 30, 2016):

From KPLU: How The Language Of Special Education Is Evolving

My first piece in this series was about how the City and other outside forces seem to be lining up to takeover the district, piece by piece. This thread is about legally mandated programs for students that have been an issue for the district for a very long time, namely, ELL, Special Education and Advanced Learning. I'm not going to go into a dissection of each because I'm not qualified to speak fully on ELL or Sped. (And I'm not looking for another discussion on Advanced Learning.  Please do not go off-topic on this point.) The issue is that our district has consistently either failed to provide services, provided partial service or failed to provide services in a timely manner for all of these programs at one time or another.  This has happened for many years.  The district has been under review for both Special Education services and ELL services by OSPI over the last year.  To be fair, I know that ELL and Special Education services are expensive and it...

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.

I haven't seen this education writer before but all I can say is she's good (and a great advocate for Special Education students and their parents.)  Thank you, Dr. Nancy Bailey .  As she says: Let’s take back reform and revive, rally, and recover public schools. Here she takes on Arne Duncan (red mine): The fact is there has been a concerted effort for years to get rid of special education. It did not start with Arne Duncan and it probably won’t end with him either. Consider IDEA 1997 and IDEA 2004. Why did they come up with those reauthorizations? If you think throwing all kids into regular classes, in the name of inclusion, and curbing parental rights for legal representation is a gift, think again. The sad fact is the ed. reformers know special ed. requires credentialed, well-prepared teachers and good programming and they don’t want to pay for it. Charter schools don’t know how to serve these children…or they don’t want to pay for it. And it is tough to...