Seattle Schools Community Forum

There was an interesting story from Inside Bainbridge about Bainbridge Island School district about some volunteers who were youth pastors.  An investigation was launched and the district has promised to improve its volunteer screening.  The story was about a middle school where three evangelical youth pastors had been volunteering over the last year, mostly in the lunchroom and at registration.  There were several issues to this story.

I had been told the fingerprinting issue had been postponed until further notice.  Thanks to reader, Lynn, for this update from Superintendent Banda in the Friday update. To: José Banda, Superintendent From: Joseph Paperman Date:October 4, 2013 SUBJECT: FRIDAY UPDATE TO SCHOOL BOARD Field Trip Procedure Revisions To help enhance the safety of our students when they participate in overnight or out of country field trips, Risk Management has recently made significant changes to the field trip procedures. These include clearer expectations for screening and training of chaperones and for behavior of student participants. The new requirements for chaperones include an orientaion by the lead chaperone (school employee), who will review student behavior expectations as defined in the “Basic Rules of Seattle Public Schools”,the Emergency Action Plan and procedures for overnight room checks appropriate to the type of lodging. Tohelp avoid blurring of boundaries between students and c...

There are not further details/information on the Hamilton substitute incident that occurred last week as the investigation is on-going.   SPS replied to these basic questions about substitute hiring. 1) Why did the reporter say the sub wasn't employed by the district? Is that right? We did not tell the reporter that the substitute wasn’t a district employee. We did say that because he isn’t a permanent teacher, he couldn’t be placed on leave. Instead, we would not give him any more assignments until the investigation was completed.

Today the Board will be holding a Work Session on the Board policies numbered in the 5000s.  The meeting is from 4-6 p.m. at headquarters.  These policies cover human resource matters so you might think it's only personnel issues.  It is but, of course, the SPS students and parents interact with teachers and staff so having awareness of these policies is important.  For example, volunteer athletic coaches for the district have to have a fingerprint check whereas regular volunteers only have to give a name and birthdate for the Washington State Patrol's WATCH program.  (When I was volunteering, everyone had to do a fingerprint check.)  I don't know why the district has changed this policy; it is more expensive to do fingerprint checks than the name/birthdate check. Keep in mind that with both, they are checking for criminal history conviction records only for the state of Washington.  Interestingly, the WA State Patrol website says: WASIS cann...