Seattle Schools Community Forum

I will note that Director Murray has received no answer from the Mayor. I will note that Councilman Tim Burgess announced this week to an elementary school group that there WILL be 14 classrooms in SPS with the City's preschool plan.   Not "may" or "hopefully" but "will."  He did NOT mention the vote tonight by the Board nor did Director Marty McLaren.  In fact, McLaren said nothing about his statement in her own remarks. Done deal much? You will also recall that the Action Item on tonight's agenda has some Exhibits attached and that I had stated that there was no Exhibit "C."  Well, there is but it is not attached.  It's mentioned here in Exhibit B:

Basically, it's Spring Break week so no meetings. Saturday, April 19th Director Blanford finally has a community meeting.  It's from 10-11am at the Douglass-Truth library. I attended both Director Carr and Director Martin-Morris' community meetings yesterday.

I'm attending the Work Session on BEX tomorrow (and hope to attend the community meeting next week). So what are your burning BEX/Capacity questions?  I think I've already heard a few: - what is your detailed plan for middle school issues in the NE? - what boundary changes might come for 2013-2014? - which schools can be renovated on-site versus those that will need an interim site?  (BEX staff recently stated at a Board ctm. meeting that they "had" to build with the school community moved but that is just not true in all cases.  It certainly isn't true for most districts in the U.S.  Most build with the school communities still on-site. What else? Update: Here's a link to the presentation . To note; I find the silence from FACMAC kind of interesting.   The district hasn't mentioned their input in a long time.  However the presentation does say they will be speaking at the Work Session so this should be good.  From the presentation...

Monday, December 3rd Community Meeting with Director McLaren from 6-8 p.m. at High Point Center, 6400 Sylvan Way SW Wednesday, December 5th Board Work Session On Capacity Management and NSAP/Transition from 4:00 -5:30 p.m.  No agenda yet available. I will note a few items related to these issues that may come up at the Work  Session that were discussed at the Operations Ctm meeting on November 15th. Tracy Libros noted that there may be potential impacts from "scheduled/approved sunsetting of transportation if students return to attendance area schools.   There are about 1800 students this could affect.  Hard to know if this would be a major impact as many parents might not choose to change schools for their student once they are established.  However, with the capacity crunch the district has, almost any number in the wrong place could be a problem.  One key spot is West Seattle Elementary where 109 students at other schools could possibly chose ...

Earlier in the month the Board had a Work Session on BEX IV.  Here are some highlights and commentary. The beginning of the meeting saw staff go over the input from the BEX IV community meetings .  It was surprisingly thin.  All that was said was that there were 510 oral and written comments and that Option #2 received the most yes votes (although I later saw the numbers and it was close between #2 and #3).   Director Martin-Morris had to ask about how this informs the Board what the community is thinking on this issue.  Pegi McEvoy said that info in was in a Friday update that had been published two weeks prior.  Here's a link to the webpage on the community meetings for BEX IV. Head of Capital Building projects, Lucy Morello, said they would be carrying over some major maintenance from BTA III.  This puzzles me.  I thought we had a separation of BEX and BTA precisely so that each has its own discrete area.  This goes to the issu...