Seattle Schools Community Forum

Update:   a couple of corrections. Sue Peters is, of course, the Chair of the Audit&Finance Committee (which I attributed to Director Harris.)  Director Peters had asked Harris to chair the meeting since Peters was unable to be physically present. As well, I attributed a statement to Peters that was Geary's about how Director Blanford felt the $11M should be spent. end of update As I previously reported, the Board was having an Audit&Finance Committee Meeting of the Whole and then had an Executive Committee Meeting of the Whole and then a Work Session on the 2016-2017 Budget to figure out to do with this $11M underspend that was found.

A guest post from Kellie LaRue and Meg Diaz in two parts.  My early comment is that these are two parents who know how to analyze both data and lack of data.  They have done their homework.  But like Charlie and I have said, you are only as good as the data that you can get from the district.  But we try. Part One: Enrollment Data and Public Information What seems like a reasonable way to gauge who might have erred is to look at the rest of the available enrollment data, sparse though it may be. If the rest of the data is pretty consistent and lacking in anomalies, then it seems reasonable to conclude that the district got it right, and Garfield had an unusual counting flub.  But first, a second to rant about the incredible scarcity of enrollment data.  Enrollment data directly drives hundreds of millions of dollars of public funding. It is important that it be both accurate and public. Right now, it is neither. 

Yesterday staff presented an update to the Board during a Work Session on the Strategic Plan.  I did not attended but just read thru the presentation .  It includes survey results of both parents and staff. Here's what I wrote the Board: Dear Directors, Looking at the Strategic Plan Presentation, I see this notation: At this stage, we are highlighting data but do not yet have root cause analyses or proposed solutions. I can help.

  From SPS: The Source will be unavailable on Friday, May 23rd from 5:00pm - Tuesday, May 27th 6:00am for maintenance. This planned outage is required to upgrade PowerSchool to a newer version and improve performance and reliability. We apologize for any inconvenience. What field are incoming UW freshmen picking when they pick Engineering?  Number one (hugely) is Computer Science.   What's on your mind?

I reported previously on the discussion of the issue of NW Center and Cascade as discussed at the Board meeting on Wednesday, March 5th.  That, along with later start time advocates, was the bulk of public testimony.  I note that it seems that a call seems to have gone out that at every Board meeting, there needs to be two non-profit groups working with Seattle schools that come and tell the Board how much they need student data and how careful they are with it.  They also come with an "example."  There were two people at the Board meeting that night. I think I mentioned previously how one of these providers came to a meeting and practically outed a middle school student (with a lot of personal description about the student).   Coincidentally, the district is having a Work Session on how they take care of student data just this coming Wednesday but I'll write separately on that.  I'll just say this the district does NOT have everything in place...

The District migrated to a new enterprise software, PowerSchool. When this was pitched to the Board, they were pretty much told that they had no choice. The company that made the software they were using was bought by Pearson and Pearson stopped support of that program. They offered to help districts making the migration to Pearson's software, PowerSchool, but districts would be on their own if they wanted to move to any other software. PowerSchool would also offer a lot of attractive capabilities that were available as modules, including one that would replace The Source. This is a VERY BIG DEAL. This software collects, tracks, and reports just about all of the information for all students throughout the system. It runs everything - schedules, grades, test scores, medical information, and more. Unfortunately, the roll out of PowerSchool was less than ideal. Users didn't get enough training - some got none. The District didn't get much support from Pearson and the IT de...