Seattle Schools Community Forum

Almost a year ago I did a thread on South Shore and compared it to the other K-8s.  I found in reading, SS is about the same as most K-8s but the math is worse.  So I did a comparison today with South Shore, Roxhill and Maple from 2009 to today and there seems to be two issues.  One, something seems amiss from 3rd to 4th grade at South Shore .  The children in third grade do really well only to see those scores drop (and I mean drop) by 4th and into 5th.  Two, there is a bit of a mystery about South Shore.  No one mentions the long-time partnership that started South Shore (with the New School Foundation and now LEV).  Not at their school website and barely in the district's own pages.  You'd think this would be some shining example of (1) what you can do with smaller class sizes and (2) public/private partnerships.   Why doesn't the district talk about SS more when confronting legislators over funding?  I note the district d...

I've now heard of two neighborhoods that are not happy with boundary changes. Members of the Hawthorne Elementary community is not happy about having their middle school assignment changed from Mercer to Aki Kurose. Members of the Georgetown community are not happy about having their elementary school assignment changed from Maple to Van Asselt.

I'm behind on this one and I forgot about something happening today - it's National Library Week and today a picture is going to be taken in every Washington state library.  I hope the schools put this word out and got kids in their school library for the photo.  My apologies.

Upfront, I want to get a few things off my chest from what I heard at both the Work Session and the Board meeting.  I'm going to write this opinion and then move on to what was said at the Work Session and Board meeting.