Seattle Schools Community Forum

From The Stranger Slog comes a story about an Ingraham teacher who wore a Michael Jordan face mask and hand gloves to school for Halloween. I honestly found this story jaw-dropping if only for how long administrators allowed this at schools. 

From SPS Communications: The Alliance for Education and Seattle Public Schools today announced a multi-year agreement to sustain the International Baccalaureate (IB) program at Rainier Beach High School, which has been at risk of being discontinued at the end of the current academic year due to lack of funds. The Alliance for Education has pledged $50,000 per year in philanthropic funds for each of the next three school years – 2016-2017, 2017-2018, and 2018-2019 – for a total of $150,000. This pledge has been made possible through the early support of the Thomas B. Foster Endowment and the John Stanford Fund. Seattle Public Schools will fund the remaining costs of the program and will be examining mechanisms to sustain the program beyond the 2018-2019 school year.

 Update:  here is a link to all the updated BTA IV documents .  There is now a line: Capital and Technology Financing Obligations principal payments - $8.1M Where did this money come from (did they add dollars or rearrange?)  They rearranged but I'm not sure what projects lost what. Now I did ask if this is all just to pay off JSCEE.  The answer was...not sure.  I really would love a full accounting of all that has been paid into JSCEE, how much remains, when payments are due and when there is an end in sight.  This is patently ridiculous at this point.  While I realize there is virtually NO one at JSCEE who helped enact this nonsense, the fact of the matter is a lot of people there - both on the Board and in management - have kicked this can down the road for a very long time. end of update In advance of Wednesday's public comment meeting for BTA IV levy and the Operations levy, I have uploaded the handout from the community meetings ...

The Ingraham High School varsity ultimate frisbee team won the city co-ed/mixed-gender championship last weekend. Seattle has the best youth ultimate scene in the world, so winning the city championship is a really big deal. Our current seniors won the league their freshman year, and after a few rebuilding years, they’re back on top again. They crushed a really solid Bainbridge Island team (where I used to coach before Ingraham) in the semifinals, and then beat an incredibly athletically dominant team from Skyline High by one point in the finals. Every single Ingraham student conducted themselves with dignity and spirit on the field, and both of our opponents were extremely impressed not just with our level of play, but with our sportsmanship and fair-mindedness. Ultimate is a self-refereed sport, and even though play got very intense, everybody kept their cool and made us all proud. We’re sad to lose our incredible seniors at the end of this year, but luckily we only...

From SPS Communications: Ingraham will hold a Saturday School  on May 30th from 8:30 – 11:30 AM , and Center School will hold a Saturday School  on June 6  (I believe similar hours to HIS but I’ll need to confirm). This is to ensure that all seniors have at least 175 instructional days while still allowing their scheduled graduation and graduation night events to take place. From the City of Seattle: Seattle Parks and Recreation has announced it will open and staff drop-in activities at 21 designated community centers for Seattle Public School students from kindergarten to 8th grade in response to the May 19 teacher walk-out. The free program will operate from 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday, May 19 and will include supervised recreation activities, with an anticipated supervision ratio of 20 children to 1 adult leader.

Good News It is very pleasing to see different high schools do well with programs at their schools.  Ballard excels with video production, Roosevelt and Garfield with jazz bands and now Ingraham is doing great with their Rocket Club. Last Saturday, Ingraham participated in the Team America Rocketry Challenge in Virginia, coming in third.  Over 700 teams competed.  There were three Ingraham teams with Foxtrot winning 3rd and $1,000 for the school.  Each team had to create and build an under-two pound rocket by themselves.  They were judged on how close they came to their predicted trajectory and landing their rocket in less than 60 seconds. Foxtrot was just one foot off the 800-foot target and landed about 48 seconds after liftoff.  Team Foxtrot's first score of 1.0 was the best single flight score in the history of the competition.   Speaking of Ballard filmmakers , SPS Communications is reporting that Ballard was the ONLY school to w...

By a vote of 48 to 1, Ingraham staff passed the following resolution: A RESOLUTION OF DISAPPROVAL OF THE SMARTER BALANCED ASSESSMENT WHEREAS Ingraham High Schoo l strives to provide an excellent education to every student; WHEREAS the Smarter Balanced Assessment is not required for graduation; WHEREAS this computer-based assessment will take approximately eight hours for each 11th grader to complete and its confusing format is unlike anything students will experience outside the testing environment; WHEREAS there are not enough computers to test the students in a reasonable amount of time and it is unacceptable for computers to be unavailable to non-testing students for such a long period of time; WHEREAS the failure rate of the assessment is going to be extraordinarily high (possibly 60%) for the general population and even higher for students of color, ELL students, and students on individualized education plans; WHEREAS student performance on this test will in no w...

 Update: I realize my original headline that did contain ("no thanks to the district") and  was not fair.  The district DID create the IB programs at Ingraham, Chief Sealth and now Rainier Beach.  It just that they don't support them in the way those programs should be supported if they expect them to thrive.  Again, the district creates programs they do not support (like IB and dual-language.) end of update The Times owns up to something good happening in Seattle Public Schools (without charters or a state turnaround order).  Tangled in bureaucracy and tradition, public schools need years — often the better part of a decade — for real turnaround, so skeptics may wave off the spike in graduation rates at Rainier Beach High as a mere blip. Or ignore its ballooning enrollment. Or shrug at the dozens of students on track to leave with college credit for advanced studies. No marker is more stunning than Beach’s 25-point increase in graduation r...

A notice went out to all the parents at IHS, but there are two confirmed cases of pertussis (whooping cough) at Ingraham. Pregnant women and infants should stay out of the school building for a bit. Whooping cough in high school?  Get the vaccinations, okay?

Ingraham High School has a  Native/Latino club.   Since both the district and the City had passed resolutions recognizing Indigenous Peoples Day every 2nd Monday in October and, since November is Latino Heritage Month/Native American Heritage month , the club had asked the school for a school-wide assembly to "promote and celebrate" these recognitions. But the school leadership said no.  According to a press release, "Ingraham H.S. has no formal policy or procedure for student club initiated school-wide assembly requests."  The students do have a grant to raise awareness of Native American students and wanted to use some of those funds for the assembly "to engage the Ingraham community by educating staff and students about local and National leaders, artists, activist and providing a rare look into Native/Latino perspectives, experiences and contributions." The students are not happy with the no coming from the office. These Ingraham students plan...

Thank you to my readers; I can't be everywhere and these are important updates all parents should know. First, Ingraham staff just voted down their budget, 58-1 and released the following statement: " We reject the budget on the grounds that it forces us to compromise basic student and staff safety, requires us to compromise building and community standards for a comprehensive high school and reflects the wrong priorities for Seattle Public Schools and its students." I am unclear about the ramifications of this vote-down.  I believe that the district will wait and then if no budget is forthcoming, will figure a budget on their own.  I have to think that this will, in turn, cause a great rift between schools and the district.  I will ask what comes next. Update from SEA Facebook page: As of 7 p.m. Wednesday, 25 Seattle schools have voted to reject budgets for next year. Seattle schools cannot take any more cuts! NO CUTS TO SCHOOL BUDGETS! Educators n...

Good news from SPS: Four teams from Franklin High School’s Academy of Finance Social Entrepreneurs and Chief Sealth International’s Academy of Finance International Social Entrepreneurs won top prizes June 6 at the Youth Venture Spring Community Showcase in Seattle. Ballard High students in the Video Production Program have received eight nominations in four categories from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for the Northwest High School Awards of Excellence. This makes the seventh year in a row that Ballard High School video producers have been nominated. Last year they received seven nominations and won the categories of Long Form, Fiction and Photographer/Editor. Nova student Hailey Spencer won a National Silver Medal for a science fiction/fantasy story at the regional Scholastic Art and Writing Awards competition.  She will move onto the national competition.  She also won two regional writing awards.  There were also regional ...

I've gotten way behind on threads and I did want to flesh out the discussion leading to Ingraham High School's decision to leave PTA and have a Parent Teacher Organization. By my count, there were about 60+ people at the meeting.  It was a regular PTA meeting so they did their business meeting first.  (They did their Golden Acorn awards and I really love hearing these stories about such hard-working and positive people.) The PTA President, Keiki Kehoe, gave some background to the issue saying the PTA had felt increasingly distant from the state PTA.  She said that it was a unanimous vote of the Ingraham Board to bring it to the membership for consideration.  She spoke of the common bond of all to work for the students, teachers and staff of the school. The PTO side was Rosemary Daszkiewicz.  She laid out the issues: - costs of giving money to the state/national PTA.  At their school, this is about $2k per year.  They feel they need every penny a...

The vote was 44-29.  It was quite a compelling and civil discussion.  I'll write a wrap-up of it tomorrow but I'll leave you with two thoughts. 1) Will this spur other schools to consider this action?  Hard to say but one person who is a member of two PTAs said her other PTA is also considering this action.  Will it be like Garfield's early and firm stance on MAP and allow other schools to take a look at what is happening at their school? 2) There were several issues in play but one broad issue is this: What is the purpose of a parent-teacher group at a school?   Do you want a combo of school-based needs with big group identity/advocacy?  Is one more important than the other?  Does every dollar raised count when your school has high needs (and possibly low ability to raise much money)? 

U.S. Department of Ed official to visit Cleveland High School today to promote "transformation efforts."  From SPS: Brenda Dann-Messier, who heads the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Vocational and Adult Education, will visit Seattle’s Cleveland STEM High School on Tuesday, April 30, spotlighting the school’s transformation efforts aimed at promoting educational excellence for its students. As previewed in President Obama’s State of the Union address, the administration is proposing $300 million for a new High School Redesign program, which would fund competitive grants to districts partnering with postsecondary institutions, businesses and non-profits to help ensure that all students graduate from high school with college credit and career-related experience.   The irony here is that Cleveland was not created to be self-sustaining (because it got rolled out too quickly because of MGJ's ego) and the school actually needs the very kind of grant th...

A bit of a roundup of PTA news.  (Please keep in mind that I am a long-time PTA parent.  I think, on paper, PTA is a good thing but it doesn't always play out the way you might hope in practice.) First up from the Washington State PTA , news from their upcoming convention.  You may recall that they have teamed up with McDonald's for sponsorship of the convention.   I recall that, at the time, it seemed like an odd pairing given the childhood obesity rates in this country and the food that McDonald's serves.  But The WSPTA offered a spirited defensive saying McDonald's was making an effort to provide better choices to parents.  That may be true but it doesn't make McDonald's fast-food into health food. Now I see that in their PTA convention materials that not only will McDonald's have a presence at the convention, they actually will be presenting at the convention.  Their "director of nutrition" has a spot in the convention lineup of speakers. ...

From the Audit & Finance Committee meeting today comes news of the first Open Enrollment Data. As stated in the headline, SPS enrollment looks to go over 50,000 for the first time in decades, to just over 51,000. That is based on an increase of 1300 students for next year.  Interestingly, it is NOT at kindergarten where projections show a lower number, just under 300 students.  The real increase is at 6th grade at about 160 students.  Oddly (and I mean I don't get statistically how this happened), they got all the high school numbers right on target.  The highest projected change for high school is at the sophomore level with more than 100 students. Tracy Libros, head of Enrollment, said she thought the enormous growth line of birth-to-K may be stabilizing.  Director Carr noted the change in 6th grade.  Dr. Libros said that Jane Addams is doubling the number of 6th grades classes and adding one 7th grade class.  They attracted many Spectr...

First up, some good news from SPS Communications: The McClure Middle School boys team won first place in the Team Relay Heat of Erg Ed’s Indoor Rowing Championship. In second place were the Pathfinder K-8 girls, and in third place were the Madrona K-8/Broadview-Thomson K-8 team. Launched in 2010, Erg Ed is a classroom-based indoor rowing education program operating as part of Seattle Public School's physical education curriculum.  In partnership with Seattle Public Schools, Erg Ed is currently provided at 14 middle and K-8 schools across the city.  With more than 800 pledges, Roosevelt High School let it be known loud and clear that they are against texting and driving . And to celebrate this massive turnout for the "Save it Seattle" campaign, Roosevelt welcomed Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson to their campus March 22. The Verizon Wireless "Save It Seattle” contest challenged students at four Seattle high schools to take a pledge against textin...

 Update: This post from EdVoices by Seattle parent, Sue Peters, on why she doesn't support MAP. Via Diane Ravitch's blog: - Australian teachers chime in. - I haven't seen the letter but Ingraham teachers have apparently notified the Superintendent of their support for the boycott. - by the numbers, 38 teachers at Chief Sealth have joined the MAP boycott, 8 support it and 2 abstained. - op-ed from Garfield student in Crosscut  - I hadn't heard much from elementary teachers but one did write to me and sent along her letter to the Superintendent.  There were the usual complaints about time from instruction, library shut-down, missed services and then there was this: "I had a 2nd grader tell me how much better her score was than her peers.  When I asked her how she knew she said she had listened in as the librarian reported them to her peers." That should NOT be happening and even Michael Tolley admitted at the press conference that the district ne...

It appears that Executive Director of Schools for the SE Region, Bree Dusseault, will be leaving SPS.   You may recall that Ms. Dusseault was the Executive Director pushing for Ingraham principal Martin Floe's dismissal.   Principal Floe kept his job and she was moved to the SE Region.  I was told she is taking a position with a charter group.  Honestly, not one surprise here and it's one fewer TFA person in this district.