Seattle Schools Community Forum

I missed this but in June, the US Department of Education released data on disparities in education resources and opportunities for U.S. public ed students.   It is called the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) and covers about 7,000 school districts.  There are two parts.   Part 1 was released in June and covered primarily enrollment data and part 2, which will be released this fall, collected cumulative and end-of-year data.  Part 1 covers: access to the rigorous sequence of college and career-ready math and science courses,  the number of first and second-year teachers in schools,  the number of high school counselors in schools,  availability of pre-K and kindergarten programs,  districts operating under desegregation orders or plans, and  whether districts have written policies prohibiting harassment and bullying on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, or disability. Part 2 will cover; numbers of stude...

So they hashed it all out about the $3.3M at the truncated Work Session this afternoon. All the Directors were there, save Betty Patu who was traveling. Dr. Goodloe-Johnson was also in attendance. There were several options laid out including breaking the money into chunks to help several different areas. The bottom line is that the Directors felt the over $100 increase per month for full-day kindergarten was too much. They agreed to a $30 per month increase for 2011-12 with the sum gradually going up year-by-year to meet the costs. That will take up $2.1M. The rest of the money will go into a "risk" reserve contingency fund. To be clear, the district already has a contingency fund of $4.6M but that is truly disaster money. Staff identified a number of "risks"for this budget year from either federal or state funding (or both) that are still unknown. If the numbers don't come thru (and the latest state economy numbers that came out are not good), then the d...