Seattle Schools Community Forum

The Seattle Times is reporting that Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn wants to offer developers a waiver from height restrictions if they will provide space for a downtown elementary school in South Lake Union. It's unclear if the offer is good only in South Lake Union or in other parts of downtown. I don't know who the mayor is talking to, but it isn't anyone who is telling the truth about this.

Let the Mayor know your thoughts about funding for youth and families. From the Mayor's office: To make it easier to keep up with the Initiative as it progresses, we've added a results section to our website ; you can go there to see the top priorities identified by each small group at both the large-group workshops and the community caucuses, as well as a map showing the general distribution of our attendees so far. If you know anyone in the Ballard area who has not yet had an opportunity to participate, the Mayor will be at a community caucus at Ballard High School next Monday, May 3rd from 7-8:30 PM that will be open to the public . Also on the City budget front: There are also two very important opportunities for input coming up this week and next in the form of public hearings on the budget. The Mayor will be attending each one along with members of the City Council in order to give you as community members the chance to express your budget prioritie...

The Mayor's Youth and Family Initiative will hold a Special Education Caucus on Tuesday, April 27, at 7:00pm, at the Roosevelt High School Library. The Youth and Families Initiative is an program announced by Mayor Mike McGinn during his inaugural address. The goal of the Initiative is to identify challenges youth and families face and to collectively mobilize towards solutions so that all children in Seattle can succeed. The Initiative will help shape the agenda on issues affecting youth and families from a child's birth to their successful career track. The caucus takes 90 minutes and culminates with each group choosing a delegate to represent its priority issues and potential solutions at the city-wide Congress at Seattle Center on June 5. This is a chance to focus specific attention on Special Education issues in Seattle.

I missed last night's Town Hall on Youth and Families Initiative by Mayor McGinn at the Rainier CC. Here's an account from Publicola . In several crowded meeting rooms (including one room filled with about 75 Burmese speakers), hundreds of participants divided up into a dozen groups to answer three primary questions: What do we want for our children and families? What are our most critical challenges and how should we prioritize them? And what are the solutions? Their top five suggestions weren’t terribly surprising: Making schools more accountable; providing more support for families to make kids ready to learn; creating more affordable housing; closing the academic achievement gap and reducing the high-school dropout rate; and giving kids more opportunities to get engaged. But the overwhelming community response to the forum—hundreds of people, many of them with young kids in tow, showing up for a two-hour community forum on a Monday night?—was. There are fo...

I attended the Open House at City Hall yesterday and heard Mayor McGinn speak. It was a pretty nice event; there were tours of the Mayor's office, we got to meet the deputy mayors, aides and, of course, the Mayor himself. I told the Mayor (who for some reason, remembers me from that long-ago interview last April) to please not forget about Seattle schools. He said it was in his speech (and indeed it was). I also got to go through the City Council offices and touched base with Tim Burgess and an aide to Sally Bagshaw (a new member of the Public Safety and Education Committee), Kathy Nyland, who said she periodically checks this blog. It is a great thing to know that our city leaders are making the effort to keep public education on their radar and not just from the district's point of view. (Also, if you have little kids, they had a great kids band something with Monkey in the name. If you ever see they are giving a concert, go. Very fun and very high-energy. They had ...

Our newly-installed mayor would like your ideas for Seattle. One area he's interested in is education. Follow this link to give your input. There are already several ideas and some of the comments are interesting. You can also vote on ideas.

I actually have several other posts to write but something happen this morning that I wanted to share. First, I received a phone call from Mary Bass. She just wanted some feedback from me on what I think I'm hearing here and other places about her performance as a director. We arranged a time to speak later. Then, I'm listening the weekly news round-up on KUOW. I knew they would likely be talking about the primary election results so I was interested. There was Joel Connelly from the PI, Eli Sanders from the Stranger and Joni Balter from the Times. They were discussing how Joe Mallahan and Mike McGinn were behind the learning curve about being the mayor and needed to come up to speed. I decided to call in and see if I could mention that the same holds for the School Board candidates (as well as mention my discussion with Mike McGinn about his viewpoint about the schools). So they were more interested in the my conversation with McGinn and I explained that I talked to him...