Seattle Schools Community Forum

First off - paying for consultant W. Les Kendrick - is the best money this district has spent on a consultant in a long, long time. Mr. Kendrick was the featured speaker at the Wednesday Work Session on Capacity Management and, despite a long PowerPoint (that he powered thru - staff take note), he was clear and concise.  And, boy is he a guy who likes his work - his enthusiasm for demographics was right out there.

The headline story from the Seattle Times this morning - Surging Enrollment Blindsides Schools .  (I wish it had been "blindsides district" which would have been more the case.)  The photo of the Hay students having a class out in the hallway pretty much sums up the issue.

This is the first I've heard of this and echoing Kellie LaRue who forwarded it to me, I don't know what to make of it. SPS Demographics Review Task Force Application Date: Thursday May 19, 2011 Time: 9:00 am - 10:00 am   Location: John Stanford Center Notes: SPS Demographics Review Task Force Application Due Thursday, May 19, 2011 Seattle Public Schools is looking for a few volunteers from the community to participate on a Demographics Review Task Force. Current demographic projections suggest that up to 7,000 new students may enter Seattle Public Schools over the next 5 years. The total student population could rise from 47,000 students today to 54,000 students over the next 5 years impacting every school in the District. The purpose of the task force is to review the impact of demographics on the New Student Assi...

As I started this thread, I went to look for the handouts that were available.  Here is the link to the agenda for the handouts.  However, I am very annoyed that I cannot easily locate the one that I thought was the most interesting.  What this means is tomorrow I have to call Tracy and then have someone send me the link because, of course, you can't find a darn thing at the new website.  This also means sending a letter to the Susan Enfield (and the Board)  to request that every single thing staff hand out be posted.   (Sorry to be grumpy but it's tiresome to have to do this multiple times in a week.)  More on the interesting handout at the end of this thread. 

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.

I am going to try to give some analysis to what was presented yesterday at the Board Work Session. As I mentioned previously, the first part was Demographics with many charts presented by district demographer, Rachel Cassidy. (FYI, all the Board was there except Cheryl Chow, out of the country, and Harium Martin-Morris on Board business.) There were a number of things both on the charts and in Rachel's remarks that didn't quite ring true to me. I am not trained so she probably has good reason to come to her conclusions. Slide 8 about factors driving enrollment. One of the factors listed was "dropout and graduation rates". I thought this odd simply because I'm not sure that most people, when enrolling their student, think about this. Or maybe it was meant as there is more room in high schools because we have a high dropout rate. Slide 9 was a chart showing births and kindergarten enrollment. We lose about 2,000 of these kids from birth to enrollment. She said...