Seattle Schools Community Forum

From the Seattle Times of 21 October 2011 : School Board President Steve Sundquist said he plans to talk with interim Superintendent Susan Enfield about enforcement of the pledge policy. "The School Board's policy is clear. State law is clear. And our job is to follow the state law and to follow our policy, so I'm firmly in the camp that says we need to be doing this," Sundquist said.  All of a sudden, Director Sundquist believes that his job is to follow the state law and to follow the school board policy. Wonderful. I bet we can think of some state laws and school board policies he can start following right away. How about the state law on conditional teacher certification? How about the board policy on program placement? Others?

The Board had a half-day retreat last Saturday with all the directors in attendance.   Others in the room included Noel Treat, head legal counsel, Holly Ferguson, director of policy and governance, Susan Enfield, superintendent, Karen Reed, consultant, Theresa Hale, School Board office administrator.  (There was to be someone from the Alliance but she didn't show.  This was somewhat disturbing to me because even though the Alliance states they now want to guide SPS policy, I have no idea why the Board thinks this should be so.) Michael DeBell and Sherry Carr have been the lead directors around this work.  This work is slated to be finished and voted on by the Board by May./June 2011.   Karen Reed led and guided the discussion. This retreat was around revisions/additions to core policies around the Governance and Oversight Policy .  Basically, what is the work that the Board does?  Namely: Board Oversight of Management - purpose, oversigh...

Here's an interesting discovery, courtesy of Dan Dempsey: RCW 42.56.040 . This State law requires local government agencies, such as school districts, to prominently display and make available for inspection any and all rules of procedure. The District must, by state law, provide written statements of the nature and requirements of all formal and informal procedures and statements of general policy or interpretations of general applicability formulated and adopted by the agency. Think of a District procedure, especially one of those less transparent ones, such as Program Placement. According to state law, the District is required to have a written statement of the procedure and process used to determine program placement. I don't believe they do. I don't know how specific these statements need to be, but I can't imagine that the description currently provided is sufficient. Think of some of other more opaque decisions made by the District. Think of some of their more i...