Seattle Schools Community Forum

The first of the community meetings around BTA IV coming up in Feb. 2016.  It's at Mercer Middle School, 1600 S. Columbian Way from 6:30-8:30 pm. There is also one on Wednesday at Ballard High School , 1418 NW 65th St from 6:30-8:30 pm. There are more next week at other locations; see the district calendar.

I attended the Board Work Session yesterday on Capital Programs and Plans.  It was both informative and annoying. Attending were Directors McLaren, Patu, Blanford, Peters, Peaselee and Martin-Morris.  Director Carr, like at last week's Board meeting, was not in attendance.  Staff included Superintendent Banda and the head of Capital/Facilities, Flip Herndon.  Dr. Herndon gave the entire presentation. There was a good laugh before the meeting when Director Blanford said that he had a lot of people asking him if he was Richard Sherman or Marshawn Lynch of the Seahawks (the only similarity is that they are all three black men with long hair - they don't look like each other at all.)  I later asked Director Blanford if anyone asked him if he was Lawrence Fishburne - a joke based on an entertainment reporter who this week was interviewing Samuel L. Jackson and thought he was Lawrence Fishburne.  Jackson's reaction was priceless. Dr. Herndon did two good th...

Monday, December 9th Curriculum & Instruction Committee meeting from 4-6 p.m.  Agenda.  Update on math adoption scheduled. Wednesday, December 10th Executive Committee Meeting, 8:30 am to 10 am. Agenda .  Mostly review of upcoming Board meetings and legislative matters. Oversight Work Session; Finance . 4-5:30 pm.  Agenda Interesting to see on page 13 that in nearly every division in the Budget department, spending is to go up in 2013-2014.  This after our new CFO (and that's what I'm going to call him because these lengthy titles are a pain), Ken Gotsch, said at the Board retreat that the current shortfall is between $18-19M and they have to look for reductions.  They could try keeping the budgeting for these divisions at their current levels for one.  (In fact, the "assistant superintendent" - I'm not sure who this is -  has a budget that goes from  $301,117 to $484,269.  That's up over 30%.) On page 15, they have a pa...

From SPS history: South Africa's first black president, Nelson Mandela, visited Seattle and toured Madrona Elementary School almost 14 years to this date on Dec. 8, 1999.  Madrona  is now a K-8 school. What a lucky group of students on that day. At Board retreat today, a very different tone and feel.  Still the same kind of talk and team-building but not the same vibe.  A major theme is being collegial, being respectful of everyone's time and changing the public talk about the district. So refreshing to hear: - Facilities' Flip Herndon say one is his major goals is cutting down the maintenance backlog.  (You know me and that backlog so Friday, I'm in love.) - President Peaslee expressing the desire to get rid of the drumbeat of a "dysfunctional" Board and going around the table and asking Board members what committee they would like to serve on. -   Both new directors said that they would like to see if the committee meetings could ...

Earthquake.  Tsunami.  Get that earthquake kit together. I'm at the BEX Oversight Committee meeting and a couple of things just occurred to me: - the money for the Silas Potter program came from Capital (you all understood this, right?)  Question is, which Capital pot of money - there are 3 possible choices.  It would be interesting to find out and see who had oversight for that money (likely Fred Stephens but there might be others).  - they are going to build decidedly bigger schools for elementary so for those whose schools might come in on the BEX IV list, you will get a new building but you will also have a larger school population.   The new size range proposal is 510-734.  (And there are plenty of large elementaries throughout the nation.  I think we are more of an anomaly for an urban district to have many "small" schools.) - KING 5 news had a blurb about the district cutting one-third of maintenance staff to fill the budget ga...

There was much of interest discussed at last week's Operations Committee meeting. I think the Capacity Management issue will be a bigger item of interest but as I stated previously, I'm still waiting for some documents to be on-line so that I can link to them. There were three documents related to Facilities (not including the monthly summary which is almost useless). Two were labeled "Annual Report" but I'm not sure anyone would think of them as reports. (One page, both sides? Considering all the work done in a year on facilities, how is that a report?) The first was was an annual report on " BTA Related Information ." It reviewed the work need to be done in seven weeks to get BTA projects done on Queen Anne, Rainier View and Viewlands. (The seven-week period was not specified so I don't know when they are talking about. Summer?) They point out that there are many unknowns in the work. Now look, I get that some of these b...