Seattle Schools Community Forum

School Board meeting highlights (thru Board comments).  Here's the full video :

I attended the Operations/BTA IV community meeting at Roosevelt this week.  It was disappointing on several fronts. Attending staff included Charles Wright, Flip Herndon, Tom Redman, Joe Wolf, Richard Best, and Carmen Rahm (and a budget staffer whose name I didn't hear and can't find at the district website). There was a dizzying array of handouts.  I don't know if staff has something against trees or cannot devise a couple of handouts to cover the issues but this was overload.

Yes, that is the title of a story at the district's homepage.  I will try to stifle a smile as this has not - to terrible effect - always been the case. Here's the link to the entire story. I note that the brag in the story is how close they get.  What's puzzling is that at the Work Session on the budget this week, there were repeated references to the projections for this year being off.  Not sure how to reconcile the two thoughts.

 Update:   Here's the district waitlist .  The high school waitlists are long for 9th grade - Franklin, 88, Garfield, 80, Hale, 68, Roosevelt 87. JSIS, Pathfinder, Queen Anne, Lafayette, McDonald,  and K-5 STEM at Boren have a big list for K.  Mercer has 36 for 6th grade (the publicity around their success is getting around) and Salmon Bay has a long waitlist  in nearly every grade and yet the projections have their enrollment down.  TOPS has a waitlist in every grade.  Again, what's up with South Shore - its building is nowhere near full and yet they have a waitlist in almost every single grade.  Something's not right here. End of update. Here are the district's enrollment projections for next year. Highlights :

Agenda . The agenda includes Public Testimony.  I made the list but so did three people speaking about Stevens.  The directors had discussed how to make this as wide-ranging a group as possible but I'm thinking really did nothing to make that so.  I find the updates confusing.  What I think I am reading is that staff wants no changes but mitigation efforts (some of which, as I predicted, they would likely be doing no matter what the vote).  They do have a caveat that if the staff recs are changed, an update will come by the end of the day today (Wednesday the 30th). Fiscal Analysis .  I find this a bit hard to read but they present Director Carr's amendment - to create JA Middle School next school year - in two forms.  One is co-location until 2016 or co-locate one year and then JA K-8 moves out the next year to John Marshall. Enrollment projections.   Again, not a lot of help because we're not seeing the direct comparisons of what these ...