Seattle Schools Community Forum

As you may recall, I said there were peripheral issues that I found in the public disclosure e-mails.  Let's go thru them.

We've had quite the exhaustive discussion around SBAC testing and it hasn't even started. Here's one teacher's take on what should be assessed : * An assessment of children's nutrition before they come to school. * An assessment of how many times children have been read aloud to before they entered kindergarten. * An assessment on student attendance and student homework. * An assessment on children's financial stability at home. * An assessment of children's abilities to sleep each night in a loving home. * An assessment to gather data on the damage that is done to schools by politicians, CEOs and companies that lobby and manipulate schools into spending millions of dollars on products that are unnecessary, redundant and embarrassing. What do some Republican lawmakers in Minnesota want to do?  Break up Minneapolis School District...into six districts...

The Times has yet another editorial on the state of the Seattle School Board.  Yawn. This time around they reference the three bills before the Legislature around large districts. HB 1665 -  Increasing compensation for school directors in districts enrolling twenty thousand or more students. HB 1497 - Concerning appointments of the board of directors of a school district of the first class having within its boundaries a city with a population of four hundred thousand people or more.  HB 1860 - that would limit a school district size to 35,000 (affecting SPS only).  

I spoke with Tomiko Santos about this issue this morning. It was a concerning conversation because of several things she said: