Seattle Schools Community Forum

 Update: added the Audit&Finance Ctm agenda.  See the bottom for a couple of items I called out to the Board. end of update I had wrongly assumed most meetings were done for the year but had forgotten that there are generally some left before the 4th of July holiday.

Unbelievable but true.  Not only does the Alliance say - via a Times op-ed  by CEO Sara Morris and Jon Bridge -  that the district is making a mistake in ending the relationship, they don't even admit they did a thing wrong. Here are both letters. Kind of amazing considering that the district has been trying, for literally years and years, to steady and make better the relationship with the Alliance.  The district wrote quite a detailed accounting of the issues, which the Alliance answered with their letter including a refutation chart, and now, an op-ed saying how much this partnership means ...to the district. There was no partnership left.  Here's what I said in my comments at the Times:

Education Week highlights a new publication, Promising Partnership Practices 2012 , with 92 ways schools are partnering with parents and community.  The publication is for sale but individual stories are available as PDFs for free.  "Me 2! Getting Parents into Middle School," explains how Park Middle School in Kennewick, Wash., created the expectation that parents would volunteer for two hours a year at the school. The campaign included tracking progress on the 1,800-hour goal and "talking up" the expectation with students. "The A.S.P.I.R.E. Survey" is used at Bassick High School in Bridgeport, Conn., to find out what talents volunteers can share with students. More than 160 parents and community partners have gone through the small-group sessions to identify their skills and talents, which are matched to the needs and requests of teachers, administrators, and students. At Scott Elementary School in Naperville, Ill., 350 students and their...

The Board Directors are busy attending high school graduations this week so the district is fairly light on meetings. There will be a Work Session with the topic "Strategic Plan Refresh" on Wednesday before the Board meeting . The Work Session is from 4-5:30 p.m. with the Board meeting starting at 6 p.m. There are no presentation materials yet available.

Tuesday Audit and Finance Committee Mtg , 4-6 p.m.   This meeting will focus on Audit issues.  There are several debriefings like IA meetings with the City, discussion with Don McAdams (a district consultant), salary benchmarks and internal audit manager posting.  Wednesday Executive Committee Mtg , 8 am-10am.   Quite a packed agenda .   Materials adoptions for LA, Social Studies and music instruction, academic calendars, consulting services for TIF, ethics agreement with the City and partnering with the City, community engagement, and a raft of discussion items like superintendent evaluation, CFO/COO search process, protocol for following up on public testimony (really?) and much more.  There's also some sort of amendment to a contract at Denny/Sealth to rebuild the previously torn out tennis courts/softball field.  (You remember this one - it's a rebuild of something we paid for under BTA II.)  Looks like more money. It's a...