Seattle Schools Community Forum

Interesting article about the pressure on kids to "specialize" in a sport from the Steve Nash Youth Basketball blog, called The Race to Nowhere in Youth Sports. We had mixed experiences with sports with both our boys.  Great Little League experience (especially with the son with a disability).  Great rec soccer experience for my younger son.  (He did try one year of select soccer - too expensive, too much travel, too much pressure.  My son, who had real talent, was the one to say no.) We had great parents on our team but some teams had win-at-all-costs parents and to hear them and their coaches scream at kids was astonishing. Both played Ultimate Frisbee in SPS.  Mixed bag as one son was at a school - that shall remain nameless - that had a no-cut policy but also, basically, a no-play policy if you were not a star.  Really hurt his feelings to be told he would never play in a game - not even for 5 minutes because they had a "competitive" team and wan...

I'll print this in its entirety.  From Superintendent Banda: Today we are announcing several leadership changes that will improve our ability to support our schools and students. Our Strategic Plan outlines a series of goals we must achieve over the next five years to improve academic success for our students. To meet the objectives outlined in the Every Student. Every Classroom. Every Day. strategic plan, we will need to accomplish several complex projects and develop a way to support and guide this work. We recently made two key hires that will help us strengthen our ability to provide better service to schools, students and families. Barbara Robbins will now serve as the Director of Project Management and Guillermo “Bill” Echeverria has been hired as Director of Continuous Improvement. These are new positions for Seattle Public Schools and they bring a much-needed skill set to the work we are doing. Together, they will help us improve the coordination, sequencing, and exec...

Last night's Board meeting saw the honoring of four (!) SPS basketball championship teams.  (My apologies to Garfield's boys basketball team - I managed to flub my photos of them.) Ballard High School Beavers -Special Olympics Unified Basketball Team Cleveland High School Lady Eagles- 3A State Champs Rainier Beach Vikings - 3A State Champions The Superintendent in a demonstration of how much a middle school student would have to carry w/o a locker. Later Start protesters before the meeting Ballard High Video by Will Erstad, Aurore Bouriot and Side Johnson about needing more sleep.

Garfield High School's basketball team is on its way to start playing at the state finals.  (So is Cleveland's girls basketball team. )   My Northwest is reporting that after the school's third meet-up with Issaquah's basketball team, things took a nasty turn after tweets were sent saying racially disrespectful things about team members and cheerleaders.

Yes, all our comprehensive high schools will be moving to the Metro league (including Roosevelt, Ballard and Garfield).  Roosevelt will be the second-largest in the league but keep in mind, they count ONLY the numbers of 10,11and 12th graders to decide school size.  That's why Roosevelt will fit into the Metro league. Boy, that will save transportation dollars AND be one less reason to change to later start times for high school students (and middle school, as well).

I agree with this author, Amanda Ripley, writing for The Atlantic.  I have no idea why ed reformers and others seem to look the other way as the dollars and resources and energy and time flow to sports.  It's a great article . But what to make of this other glaring reality, and the signal it sends to children, parents, and teachers about the very purpose of school? In countries with more-holistic, less hard-driving education systems than Korea’s, like Finland and Germany, many kids play club sports in their local towns—outside of school. Most schools do not staff, manage, transport, insure, or glorify sports teams, because, well, why would they? Let's ask some international students who come to the U.S. for high school exchanges: One element of our education system consistently surprises them: “Sports are a big deal here,” says Jenny, who moved to America from South Korea with her family in 2011. Shawnee High, her public school in southern New Jersey, fields te...

What is the standing of women and girls in the world today?  It's hard to know. On the one hand, we now have more women in Congress than ever before.  There are now 20 women in the Senate (although as The Stranger points out, that's a group that has been around for 200 years and yet it has taken this long).  New Hampshire state government seems to be an all-woman squad at this point.  Many European countries have long had female leaders. Yet, throughout the world, rape is still a harsh and terrible tool used against women and girls.  The young woman in India who died from her injuries (and I had wondered why that was until I read that a metal rod had been used and torn her internal organs apart) has now caused women in India to say enough.   But will it be enough when you still have men who say "don't wear dresses and don't go out after dark?" Now what has been happening in the U.S.  Well, there's this from Congress via The Atlantic: AWA, which...