Seattle Schools Community Forum

I'm sorry to keep running over this topic again and again, but it continues to be a sore spot. The District is not meeting its commitments to community engagement and no one on the Board seems to care. The District committed to quarterly community meetings to update the public on the progress of the Stratetic Plan. They have not held one of these "quarterly" community meetings since May of 2009. Apparently someone on the staff determined that the attendance at the meetings was too low to make it worthwhile. There was no public notice that the meetings would stop. What was the minimum attendance required? Who set that minimum? Who counted the attendance? Who made the decision to stop the meetings? Who in the District knew about the decision to stop the meetings? What is the nature of a commitment that is conditional based on an undisclosed criteria? What, for that matter, is the nature of a commitment that is conditional? Isn't the nature of commitments that they are N...

I try to check in with the News and Calendars section at SPS every day. Oh call me crazy but I just think, "Golly, there might be some news there I can use or even better, my readers." Usually, major disappointment. So is there really so little going on at SPS? Nope, it's just a failure of the SPS Communications department. Let's look at the content that is there right now. - old story about Transition Plan from Jan. 20th - Open houses - still good information but no links and no mention of tours - levies - okay, still topical - STEM Open House...on Jan. 23rd. Way down within this topic is information about Open Enrollment. Not much help to those who would skip that topic. - Memorial Stadium meeting on Feb. 2nd - guess what? I actually missed that one. Would have gone to that meeting - National Board Certification - good stuff but still, a little old - some info on district-wide performance management. Not really helpful because (1) the teachers are going to...

So far, my experience has been mixed. I wrote a letter to all of the board members, the Superintendent, and the School Improvement Supervisor, reminding them that AS#1 has been asked to increase its enrollment as part of the Closure Recommendation approved on January 29th. I described all the work that the AS#1 community is doing to increase awareness of our program: New Website FAQ sheet New Brochure Outreach to Preschools Open House Extended tour dates   And asked for a commitment from the district to: Have Enrollment Staff visit the school or at a minimum read the pamphlet and website information so they can speak knowledgeably about the school . Discuss AS#1's restructuring at a future board meeting so that prospective families can hear from the district that they support the program and what work is being done through the restructuring. So far, I have heard back from Sherry Carr and had multiple communications with Scott Whitbeck, the School Improvement Supervisor. He was gr...

From District Communications: Dear Community Members, We want to let you know that all District computer and network services will be down for a planned outage starting Friday, 1/2/2009, at 5:00pm. All systems will be back on line not later than Monday, 1/5/2009, at 6:00am. This work was planned in advance to minimize interruption and inconvenience to our community and to district staff. We want to ensure that community members still have access to capacity management, so the capacity management web pages will be available to the public via an alternative web connection. Web site visitors will be redirected automatically to this site. This is critically important. A large Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) will be installed that will support the entire Data Center in case of a power outage. Once the UPS is installed, central computing and network services, including the VAX computer system, will be protected from power outages. This will significantly improve the availabi...

Did anyone else get yanked out of bed this morning with an early morning phone call from the Seattle Public Schools headquarters? My home phone rang at 5:50 am. My husband didn't get to it in time, and no message was left, so I dialed *69 and was surprised to find out it was the school district office calling. Then ten minutes later my cell phone rang. This time, the School District left a message announcing the 2-hour delay because of icy roads. I don't remember signing up for home phone calls in case of school delays, but I'm certainly going to call the district to ask that it not happen again. I usually get up around 5:30 or 6 am for work anyhow, but my husband and kids are sleeping and I don't want a phone call waking them up to tell them that they can sleep in longer! Okay...that's really weird...I just got another call from the district on my home phone (this time at 6:30 am) announcing the delay. Is this a case of auto-dialing software gone crazy?