Seattle Schools Community Forum

The Seattle Times is reporting the following: - Silas Potter was sentenced to 3 years, 7 months in jail.   He could get credit for the eight and a half months time that he has already spent in jail. - One accomplice, David Johnson, was convicted in early November of 30 counts and will sentenced in early Jan. - Potter and Johnson "are jointly responsible for restitution of $168, 275." - The other accomplice, Lorrie Kay Sorensen, was sentenced to 60 days of home detention with electronic monitoring.   She must pay $83k in restitution. The most basic lesson is accountability. There was failure from the top down.  Dr. Goodloe-Johnson, the superintendent at the time, is the least responsible but she should have realized that Mr. Potter's direct supervisor, Fred Stephens, was distracted by the murder of his son and the subsequent trial.   Additionally, employees within JSCEE either feared or avoided Potter; that was a well-known situation and yet no o...

 Update:  apparently Tacoma School District is now reconsidering becoming a charter authorizer.   They had paused their letter of intent because of the lack of clarity around rules but now that the Board of Ed and the Charter Commission have cleared up those issues, Tacoma may change its mind.  What's interesting is their School Board had voted in unison against 1240 saying it would hurt their district's funding.  Not sure what changed.   They have missed the window to get authorization and would have to wait until next year to become an authrorizer.  (I suspect - because I've been to the Charter Commission meetings and heard this - that several Tacoma groups who want to open charters feel they might do better with a local authorizer than the Charter Commission.) As you may have heard, Spokane School District was approved as the only other charter school authorizer in the state of Washington by the State Board of Education.   Th...

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-...

Here's the link to the Governor's e-mail page should you want to weigh in on the appropriateness of Sundquist's appointment. Steve Sundquist on KUOW on the Charter Commission yesterday.   Naturally the host of the show did not ask why Steve had been against charters when he ran for his second term and now is for them.  (I like KUOW but boy, they don't do their homework before they interview education folks.) Sundquist dodged the question about the conversion schools.  He said, over and over, that the performance criteria would determine who would open a charter school. When asked about the argument that charters would take money out of public schools, he said "no, that charter schools are public schools."  Which, of course, did not answer the question.  As a former Board member, he should well know that districts will be losing dollars. He said "objectivity" would be very important for the CC. He also said - and this was surprising but ...

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 candidates for school board in District VI, representing West Seattle are: Steve Sundquist Nick Esparza Marty McLaren Joy Anderson Please use this space to discuss these candidates' relative qualities, their positions on the issues, and your confidence in their ability and willingness to perform the duties of the office and perform them well.

The West Seattle Herald ran an interview with Director Steve Sundquist where he says some pretty interesting things.   (They will be running interviews with challengers Marty McLaren, Joy Anderson and Nick Esparza soon.)   The Herald made one mistake (I believe) which was to only list the other incumbents running and not their challengers. 

From the Stranger comes reporter Riya Bhattacharjee's look into Peter Maier and red flags that he either didn't follow-thru on or didn't wave in the faces of his colleagues.   The key one? As chair of the school board's Operations Committee, Maier acknowledges that he read warnings in a document called the Sutor report, commissioned by the district, about irregularities with a small-works contracting program, originally a component of the regional small-business development program. Peter had The Sutor Group report (given to him at an Ops Committee meeting by Stephens).  I have never heard Peter say why Stephens gave it to him (and only him) but that seems to be the case. At a March 6 school board meeting, right before the board unanimously voted to fire superintendent Goodloe-Johnson for her role in the scandal, Maier said he had been alerted to the problems and didn't tell the board. Bhattacharjee was looking for evidence that it might have made a d...

In their endorsement meeting tonight, the 34th Dems (West Seattle) gave their endorsement to challenger Marty McClaren by a whopping 62% over incumbent Steve Sundquist.   The attendance at the meeting was about 150 participants. Apparently Steve's supporters tried to bolster his case using...TFA.   Trying to be objective here, I gotta say that I don't think anyone should lead with TFA to get re-elected. First, most people won't know what it is.  Second, it would probably cause more confusion trying to explain it and explain how there isn't a shortage of teachers but the district is doing it anyway.  Third, it costs the district money (but I forgot, none of the incumbents want to acknowledge that). I am honestly hoping the challengers do their homework and give the incumbents a real challenge for this election.