Seattle Schools Community Forum

Many readers said here and in e-mails to me that they had watched their computer clock and hit "send" precisely at 8:00 am.  They were sending e-mails to the Board office to sign up for the Board meeting speakers list and they could not send them sooner than 8:00 am.  Problem was, people were getting e-mails back that they sent their e-mails about 45 seconds too early and therefore, were invalidated.  Many people challenged the district and here's what came of that: The district will be accepting time stamps after 7:59:12, since their system was .48 minutes late: "I am writing to provide an update to the situation regarding your request to provide testimony at Wednesday’s Board meeting. Staff within our Technology Services department confirmed that in comparison to official time source on the internet, such as www.time.gov, the district time system is about 48 seconds slower. Because of this, we will be honoring those requests that show receipt in our sys...

There is no school and no department in Seattle Public Schools that has worse community engagement than the School Board. Their primary community engagement is the public testimony at the school board meetings and it is a near total failure as community engagement. Can you imagine a principal who conducted their community engagement in this way? Can you imagine a principal who held a community engagement event twice a month where no more than twenty people were allowed to speak for no more than two minutes each? The principal then did not respond to anyone who spoke - not at the event, not after it, not at all. Would that be acceptable community engagement for anyone? Want to hear something ironic? If someone uses their two minutes of public testimony to speak to the Board about enrollment, or advanced learning, or school lunches, they will get a response. If the person responsible for that department is at the meeting they will come up to the person who made the testimony and talk...

As was previously reported elsewhere,  at the Executive Committee meeting this week, President DeBell brought up the issue length of time for speakers during public testimony at School Board meetings.   He said it should go from 3 to 2 minutes.   His reasoning is that the Board meetings are running too long and the Board members are not as productive as the evening gets later.  He also pointed out that there had been a reduction in the number of people speaking.  He stated that both the City Council and the King County Council have a 2-minute time period.  Director Smith-Blum agreed and offered that the public testimony could come at the end of the meeting.  She said it was a business meeting after all.  She also stated that maybe if there were multiple speakers on a subject that they could cut it back to one or two. Sharon asked about a flexible slot with encouragement to try to keep to 2 minutes but no longer than 3.  This was n...

Last night was interesting because the Board meeting was split into halves; one half the shiny and prepped TFA folks and the other side ...the rest of us.    What was interesting is that TFA seemed to only want to clap when TFA folks spoke while the rest of us knew the (polite) drill and clapped for everyone.  You notice these things when you've been to a lot of these meetings. I'll just go over the speaker testimony and do a separate thread on the latter half of the meeting.