Seattle Schools Community Forum

Update: of interest this week is the Board Work Session .  The topic? HR.  More on this in the thread, Seattle Schools This Week to come. end of update Neither Roosevelt nor Garfield placed in the top three for the Essentially Ellington competition in NYC but congrats to all these musicians for getting there and representing Seattle. The Times has two articles of note on Seattle Schools. One is about librarians and libraries in SPS.  A group of SPS librarians did their own research on funding for libraries and the fruit of their work is troubling.   For many libraries, the library fund is very dependent on the PTA.  From the article:

From our friends at the Stranger Slog , what librarians are saying: Laurie Amster-Burton, who spoke on behalf of librarians, says she actually switched schools in part because of how invasive MAP testing had become in regard to library time and space. The district has told educators that it thanks them for their concern but it needs time to work out a solution, but Amster-Burton says that these problems have existed for years, and educators have been bringing them up with the district the whole time . She brought with her a letter to Superintendent Banda, signed by 35 Seattle school librarians, in support of the Garfield teachers and in opposition to the MAP test. Excerpt from letter: Librarians, whose role is to teach information skills and support reading instruction, have been required in many schools to spend weeks and weeks as testing clerks. In many schools the first time a student visits the library is not to check out a book or research a topic, but to take a...

The National Center for Family Literacy is offering grants for their Libraries and Families Award.   Three library literacy programs that serve families will win $10,000 each and scholarships to the National Conference on Family Literacy in 2012 and 2013. Applications are due by Monday, Feb. 6, 2012. If your library is doing a great job connecting parents and children with books or if your school librarian has a great idea for that, let him or her know about these grants.

Colorado is awaiting the outcome of its trial on school funding by the state .  This article from the Denver Post lays out other states' and their court cases.