Seattle Schools Community Forum

I learned some new things at last night's Board meeting about the growth boundaries and decided to pull them out as a separate thread. 1) There is to be an added Work Session on growth boundaries in the next couple of weeks.  President Smith-Blum stated this but no date was given.  She also stated that a big concern for the Board is that "we don't compromise instructional quality" in these discussion. UPDATE: The Work Session will be AFTER the Intro of the plan to the Board, sometime between Oct 16th and Nov. 20th.  I wish it was before Intro, given we are two weeks out from that.   2) The Superintendent and various Board members specifically said thank you to all who have given comments on the boundaries.  It seems pretty clear that they ARE listening.  And, I believe the Board is listening enough to push back in some areas.  I'm not sure which ones but I believe the plan is definitely fluid. 3) One issue has risen to the top of my radar (t...

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...

FYI, the next FACMAC meeting is this Friday, Dec. 2nd from 10-noon at the Stanford Center, Room 3802.   I am sorry to say this but I think there is a lot of confusion still and frankly, this meeting only served to exacerbate it.  That's my impression.

(Update: It is with great sorrow that I pass on the news of the sudden death of Senator Scott White who was found dead in a hotel room while attending a leadership conference.  There was no evidence of foul play and an autopsy will be performed to find the cause of death.  Senator White, who had two small children, was a Seattle legislator - Laurelhurst, Northgate, Broadview, Wedgwood, Lake City and Greenwood - who cared deeply about public education.  It is a loss to Seattle.) The Seattle Times has come out with a story about the brouhaha at JSIS over the pledge of allegiance.  The Times does not cover the issue the way we first head it with some parents believing that it is wrong to make undocumented students to recite the pledge.  The Times covers the story as JSIS being a global school and that it is nationalistic to recite the pledge and so hurts the goals of the school. It seems that many parents understand that any child can opt out and as long as t...

The Superintendent announced these principal assignments today: Appointments: * Kelly Aramaki to Beacon Hill International School (Susie Murphy is retiring) * Anitra Pinchback-Jones to Rainier View, which opens this fall * Lisa Escobar to Viewlands, which opens this fall * Dr. Robert Gary to Principal-on-special-assignment at Interagency Academy, joining Kaaren Andrews Note: Pinchback-Jones has been at Bagley Elementary, Lisa Escobar and Robert Gary have been at RBHS.   Also, the word is that Bryant will either have an assistant principal or head teacher and not continue having two principals. The following individuals have served in an Interim role this year and are officially being appointed as principal. In each case the ExecutiveDirector of Schools gathered feedback from staff, families and communitybefore making these recommendations: * Keven Wynkoop at Ballard * Kelley Archer at Stevens * Keisha Scar...

Kelly Aramaki, the award-winning principal at John Stanford International School, is leaving at the end of the school year to move to Beacon Hill International School.  From a letter to parents: It’s with this utmost admiration and confidence I have in this school community that I have decided that the timing was right for me to leave the school at the end of this year in order to help our district continue to grow and strengthen international education. About one month ago, Dr. Susie Murphy, the principal who led the transformation of Beacon Hill Elementary School into Beacon Hill International School (BHIS), announced to her school community that she was retiring. BHIS is now in its third year as an international school with Mandarin and Spanish immersion programs up to 2 nd grade. Dr. Murphy and the dedicated staff at BHIS started something very exciting for a student population very different than ours; 65% of the students qualify for free and reduced lunch and 40% of the...

From the Wallyhood blog (the blog of Wallingford where B.F. Day, JSIS and McDonald are located), a post on the school reports. The blog points out the differences in scoring between JSIS (a 4) and B.F. Day (a 2) as well as the number of free/reduced lunch students at B.F. Day versus JSIS. Here's an interesting stat from the blog entry: While many folks don’t think about B.F. Day as a Wallingford school since it sits on the other side of Aurora, last year 23% of B.F. Day’s students were from Wallingford, and that number more than doubled to 48% this year due to the New Student Assignment Plan. They also provide a link to an interesting study that I forgot about from 2000 of parent involvement at JSIS and its outcomes. What is fascinating is how quickly the comments got vicious (and it points out a big issue of how parents feel about their school versus the data on its performance). One parent spoke of how he/she felt that B.F. Day gets a bad rap versus JSIS when it comes to ...