Seattle Schools Community Forum

I am obviously way behind on this thread as the next Charter Commission meeting is this week.  It was held at the Technology Access Foundation headquarters in White Center.  Very nice building and great staff.  One of the Charter Commission members, Trish Millines Dziko, runs TAF and its programs.  Chair Steve Sundquist, in his chairman remarks, stated that the Commission had sent a letter to the Board of Education.  The Commission would like to influence the BOE on the issues of timelines and fee schedules.  It appears they did get what they wanted.  One, there will be a requirement of a letter of intent to apply for a charter .  This is great because it gives everyone a heads up to who is coming and where they intend to apply (either through the Charter Commission or a school district).  Two, t he timeline for extending the deadline for decision-making has been moved to Feb. 24th.   The BOE rejected their ideas on the fe...

Charter Commission discussion The biggest bone of contention at this point is the lottery system for approved charter school applications. Now my initial read (and others as well) was that if the Board of Education received more than 8 approved charter applications from all authorizers, then they would go into a straight lottery.  The Attorney General's reading is that the seven that get to the BOE's office first will be stamped and approved.   (The BOE has NO role in authorization - they just need to document when applications come into their office.)  The BOE will, however, decide what the word "simultaneous" means.  Any approved applications that come in eighth (and it's still unclear how big a window there will be - maybe just a day), those will go into the lottery. There are some on the Commission that seem quite uncomfortable with the "race" aspect to the applications.   There seems to be consensus on the Commission to try to get clarit...

The second Charter Commission meeting took place on April 30th at the Bellevue Art Museum where Commission member Larry Wright is the Executive Director.  (I'm going to review the meeting  in two threads as it was a long meeting.)  Here are the two presentations from speakers.  One was Robin Lake from CRPE (I missed that) and William Haft of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (a group looking to make some money off the Charter Commission work.)  I haven't had the chance to look at Ms. Lake's and I will talk about Mr. Haft's in the second thread. One rant.  It was fine to have it at the Bellevue Art Museum except that the room was large and the members were not miked.  It made it very difficult to hear the members (some who are very softspoken like Cindi and Dave Quall).  As well, there were some audience members (and Lisa Macfarlane, I'm looking at you) who repeatedly had side conversations.  (I finally decided to e-...