Seattle Schools Community Forum

I recently became aware that just like start times, lunchtime varies widely from school to school.  There is a Board procedure - H61.01 that states: "Meal periods shall be long enough for students to eat and socialize – a minimum of 10 minutes are provided to eat breakfast and 20 minutes to eat lunch with additional time as appropriate for standing in line". "It is the policy of the Seattle School District, that each school located in a District building participate in the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Programs. Providing quality, nutritious meals that appeal to students in a safe, clean, pleasant dining environment shall be a priority." As Charlie likes to point out, a procedure or policy is only as good as those who will enforce it.  In this case, that would be the Superintendent.  What has come to light is that a growing number of elementary schools are having lunch periods of 20 minutes or less.   While some kids eat quickly, others don'...

 Update:  Cleveland has an orchestra class and will be adding a second one thanks to the efforts of one student, Robert Babs, and yet another dedicated SPS music teacher, Michelle Maury.  Thanks to a reader for this tip; here's the story from KING-5. Some news items first: Congrats to Aki Kurose for winning the City's competition for best middle school attendance.  They got Mollie Moon ice cream for the whole school.  This is the second competition they have won (the other was a national attendance competition). SPS has won a grant for $241k for fresh fruit and veggies for our food program.   This continues a program for a fruit or veggie snack for students and will go to 13 elementary schools where their F/RL rate is 80% or more. One of my favorite little bookshops, Ada's Technical Books , is having a good program this Thursday the 12th at 7 p.m. with author, Jessica Sklar.  She will be discussing her book, Mathematics in Popular Cul...

( Update : the WSB has a story with input from the rep from the union, Dave Westberg. According to Dave, the issue at Cleveland, 1 lunch/900 kids/113 fit in lunchroom, is on-going. Also to note, there was a story in the Seattle Times about some Ingraham students who decided to break into a house during their lunch hour because they needed money. An alert neighbor saw them and called the police. They were arrested. The more kids who leave campus, the more opportunities to find trouble. It's also hard on a neighborhood -I know not to go near 65th and 12th NE during Roosevelt's lunch hour.) The West Seattle Blog scooped me on a story I had on the backburner. (Actually the story is written by Simone Machmiller for the WSHS newspaper, The Chinook.) West Seattle High had one lunch hour and a short "breakfast break." They will now have two lunch hours and no breakfast break (similar to what some other high schools have). Of course, change doesn't come easi...

As we all know, the District centralized food service to the kitchen in SODO. This means that the kitchens in the schools will only be used to heat the food up and assemble some parts - not to actually cook it. The meals the students eat will all have been cooked at the central kitchen a day or two before. It was presented to the Board as a budget cutting move and they accepted it on that basis. No report has yet been made on the savings (if any) realized by the change. The anticipated savings would be lost if there were a significant reduction in the number of students choosing to buy and eat the school lunches. There's some complex relationships between all of these numbers, but that's how it works out. Economies of scale are lost when sales drop. Experience has shown that sales go down when the meals are cooked centrally and delivered to the schools and sales go up when the meals are cooked at the school. The students also say that the meals cooked on premises are tastier an...

As part of the presentation to the Board from Nutrition Services , came the news that they propose serving secondary schools - middle and high schools - from the Central Kitchen starting in Fall 2009. That means that the school breakfasts and lunches for the nine comprehensive middle schools (for some reason the slide says 10) and the ten comprehensive high schools will come from the Central Kitchen at the JSCEE just as 87 school sites are now served, including all elementary schools and special programs (Interagency, etc.). While pizzas will still be assembled at the school buildings and they will cook the grill items (hamburgers) there, anything that doesn't come prepared and pre-packaged will come from the Central Kitchen and only be heated at the schools. There are conflicting opinions about how this will impact food quality, but it will certainly reduce costs and result in lost hours if not lost jobs for the nutrition services workers in the buildings. It is possible, however,...