Seattle Schools Community Forum

Demography Talk The talk by SPS demographer, Dr. Natasha Rivers, on January 29th didn't have much new information.  She stated that there are links to her reports at the SPS page on demography. To note: - the district is definitely working with the City on housing trends - she stated that the district had thought they would grow by 1,000 students as they had in previous years but only gained 336.  That number seems much lower than I recall from the fall. - fun fact: the average age for new mothers in Seattle is 32 and for fathers it's 35. - the growth in SPS is not equally scattered.  Most of the growth is in the NE/NW, some in the Central area but down somewhat in the SW and especially down in the SE.

I'm following up on the story about a blind parent who is suing the district over changes to the district's website that does not allow her to access her students' information (and the company who created the website is now being sued by the district, with finger-pointing in both directions). As part of the settlement for recent litigation regarding website accessibility, our website provider agreed to migrate our public website to their latest software by Mar. 1 of this year. This migration only affects the district’s main web pages and the school websites for John Muir Elementary School, Washington Middle School and Garfield High School. In addition, the contract for our current website hosting services was terminated by the vendor and the district is seeking a new service provider. (Those are some pretty random school pages.  It would appear this fix is for the sight-challenged parent's effort to keep up with her students' work but what happens t...

Yesterday staff presented an update to the Board during a Work Session on the Strategic Plan.  I did not attended but just read thru the presentation .  It includes survey results of both parents and staff. Here's what I wrote the Board: Dear Directors, Looking at the Strategic Plan Presentation, I see this notation: At this stage, we are highlighting data but do not yet have root cause analyses or proposed solutions. I can help.

 Update:  this just in - UW is restoring the 150 slots for in-state students that had been cut.  Also, they changed the application deadline for this fall's freshman class to December 1 (for the main campus).  Heads up to all you parents of seniors considering UW. The district is still working on their website to make it more user-friendly.  There is this useful " Whom to Contact for What " page for parents with links to the appropriate page.  It's all in one place and I think this may be a help for parents.  Trouble on the Eastside ?  According to the Times , Bellevue teachers just voted "no confidence" in their superintendent, Amalia Cudeiro, by 97% over her management style.  This is her third year on the job. Bellevue has a superintendent with a teaching/administration background but most recently came from a leadership consulting firm she founded with her husband.  She says she's doing this gig one time and then will go ba...