Seattle Schools Community Forum

Let the Mayor know your thoughts about funding for youth and families. From the Mayor's office: To make it easier to keep up with the Initiative as it progresses, we've added a results section to our website ; you can go there to see the top priorities identified by each small group at both the large-group workshops and the community caucuses, as well as a map showing the general distribution of our attendees so far. If you know anyone in the Ballard area who has not yet had an opportunity to participate, the Mayor will be at a community caucus at Ballard High School next Monday, May 3rd from 7-8:30 PM that will be open to the public . Also on the City budget front: There are also two very important opportunities for input coming up this week and next in the form of public hearings on the budget. The Mayor will be attending each one along with members of the City Council in order to give you as community members the chance to express your budget prioritie...

I finally managed to get to one of the Mayor's forums (did anyone else?). It was a very mixed bag. This was in the gym at the Garfield Community Center. They had entertainment before it started which was fine except African drumming in a gym is really loud. Meanwhile, there were about 23 circles of chairs (about 14 per group). No one directed us to get into a group and we got closer and closer to the 7:00 pm start time. Seven comes and goes and the Mayor was there and I asked one of the deputy mayors "tick tock, when do we start?" He said yeah, okay. Then it was 7:15 and it finally starts. You'd think if you start late you (a) would keep the speakers to a minimum and (b) go the total hour and a half. Neither thing happened. So we finally get started about 7:30. The Mayor threw out some sobering stats: 40% of SPS students are F/RL, 53% failed the math WASL, 33% gap in 3rd grade students among different races, 40% of our students miss 10 or more days a year ...

I missed last night's Town Hall on Youth and Families Initiative by Mayor McGinn at the Rainier CC. Here's an account from Publicola . In several crowded meeting rooms (including one room filled with about 75 Burmese speakers), hundreds of participants divided up into a dozen groups to answer three primary questions: What do we want for our children and families? What are our most critical challenges and how should we prioritize them? And what are the solutions? Their top five suggestions weren’t terribly surprising: Making schools more accountable; providing more support for families to make kids ready to learn; creating more affordable housing; closing the academic achievement gap and reducing the high-school dropout rate; and giving kids more opportunities to get engaged. But the overwhelming community response to the forum—hundreds of people, many of them with young kids in tow, showing up for a two-hour community forum on a Monday night?—was. There are fo...