Seattle Schools Community Forum

KING-5 did a report on our growing district.   (And, if you hadn't heard, Seattle is apparently the fastest growing big city in the country.  It is the 21st biggest city in the country.)  KING reported that the district expects to have 60,000 students by 2020 .  That's just five-and-a-half years away.  In a very sad story from The Charlotte Observer, a charter school in Charlotte, NC, is closing immediately for financial reasons and now the 300+ students have to find somewhere else to finish the school year. What makes this story doubly sad is that state officials knew this charter was off-track financially almost from the start of the school year.   North Carolina charter supporters pushed to get their charter cap lifted and this was one of the first of 23 schools opened that year.  The state Office of Charter Schools sent staff to inspect the school in March. The team reported concerns with the instruction and the support for students ...

It's prom season and it's soon to get warmer and that means....dress code issues.  One huge issue: are leggings really pants (my young adult sons say no)?  From the Huffington Post: Younger girls often wear them as pants with little fuss. But as those same girls approach middle school, leggings have become a clothing accessory that's increasingly controversial — and seemingly, the favorite new target of the school dress code. Haven Middle School in Evanston, just north of Chicago, took what turned out to be a contentious stand: If you wear leggings, you need to have a shirt or skirt over them that reaches at least down to your fingertips.  In other words, girls need to cover their behinds. I can't necessarily disagree with this.  Sometimes leggings are made of different materials and, if they are not thick enough, can show underwear.   As I used to tell the boys at Roosevelt who had baggy pants, I'm not interested in seeing your underwear. But is ...

This is interesting. You may have heard of this issue of a little girl enrolled in a charter school in Tulsa, Oklahoma was sent home because she came to school with dreadlocks and they have a policy against "faddish hair styled" that includes dreadlocks.  Her father pulled from the school.   Her new school has no problem with her hair and that school is a regular public one. (As an aside, the issue of hair is a particularly sensitive one for African-Americans.  In fact, comic Chris Rock made a documentary, Good Hair, about this issue because of his concerns for his own daughters.  When he went on Oprah, it was one of the most illuminating shows she ever had.) But what this article in Ed Week points out is not whether a charter school can have a dress code - any school can - but could this little girl's First Amendment right have been violated?  More to the point, are charters really public schools where students have First Amendment rights?  ...