Seattle Schools Community Forum

Via Soup for Teachers Facebook page. Please join us Monday, May 23 at 7:00 pm for the next general meeting of the Seattle Special Education PTSA at JSCEE. Teachers, parents/guardians, students and community partners all welcome.  There will be guest speakers talking about different home and community based interventions and resources for our students. We will be joined by Mika Rollin, BCBA, Dr Nicole Swedberg talking about Dyslexia , Louisa Hall and Melissa Morrissette from Sound Mental Health.  Members will also be voting both for the 2016-17 Spec Ed PTSA budget and the 2016-17 Special Ed Board.  Hope to see you there! Great TED talk on inclusion in classrooms and why it's important. " 'Special' means separate."

Why, what it is, how to make it work and methods of implementing it.  A reader requested this thread. Two items to note.  Most of the searches on inclusion and education are around Sped students.  But yes, there is a whole subset of research on inclusion and gifted education.  I found a very good article about inclusion and gifted education that could be a the blueprint for going forward in SPS.  But SPS has not revealed what they are doing or why so it's hard to know if there is planned change for HC or just change. Let's start the discussion .

Some topics of interest in the Friday Memo from the Superintendent and senior staff:

Kate Martin said something - it's still unclear to me where she said it and in what context - but it is troubling.  One of our readers, Floor Pie, explained her reaction to it better than anything I could say so I'm printing her thread from her own blog.  I can only hope that Kate can explain what she means and why she said what she did. “ELL, Special Ed, and an assortment of behavioral problems are mainstreamed on the backs of average students.” This from the school board candidate I was supporting. I’d put up a yard sign and everything. Now it looks like I might have to go out there in the rain and rip that sign out with my bare hands because, excuse me, “mainstreamed on the backs of average students”?!   Sigh. I mean…I get it. I do. Teachers are spread incredibly thin. The more variables you dump on them, the less time and energy they have to actually teach. And, for what it’s worth, I was that so-called average student back in the day, sitting s...