Seattle Schools Community Forum

Monday, January 20th No School in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Wednesday, January 22nd School Board Meeting , starting at 4:15 pm.  Agenda.   Note: there is to be an Executive Session after the Board meeting for 30 minutes. 

Tuesday, January 7th Work Session: Transportation Service Standards and School Start Times from 5-6:30 p.m.  No agenda/presentation available. Should be interesting given that many want a discussion on school start times and staff seems to be pushing back mightily.   However, President Peaslee is not moving an inch on waiting to have that discussion. Special Education Advisory and Advocacy Council Meeting from 6:30 pm to 9:00 p.m., JSCEE Room 2700. Wednesday, January 8th Executive Committee Meeting , 8:30-10 am, Update- agenda School Board Meeting starting at 4:15 pm.  Agenda . Please sign up to speak on student data privacy.   The district is NOT happy over the unilateral move by OPSI in their agreement with the Seattle Times for Seattle student data.  Let them know you want a robust policy with teeth (currently none exists).   Need talking points?  Contact me.

My, but this was a year of change for Seattle Public Schools. Change at the top. The biggest news of the year was the sudden dismissal of the superintendent, Dr. Maria Goodloe-Johnson. The Board, which had dragged their feet from June to March in response to the State Auditor's report, acted expeditiously between their receipt of a report from an internal investigation of the Regional Small Business Development Program and their decision to fire the superintendent. We can make all kinds of conjecture about why the Board decided to fire her, but we need to give strong credence to their stated reason: they no longer felt that they could trust her. Dr. Goodloe-Johnson had been losing the Board's trust bit by bit in a number of other incidents over the course of the previous three years. The "Pottergate" scandal was just the last step - a big one - that took her over the line. Dr. Goodloe-Johnson was fired "without cause" and took a year's pay (over a qua...

Prior to last week's Board meeting, there was a Board Work Session on the 2012-2013 Student Assignment Plan (vis a vis capacity management).  Highlights: they will be trying to link schools with fewer ELL services to those with more to provide more access to students who need those services they will be starting the new " World School " for SBOC at Meany.  I'm not sure exactly what this entails for Special Ed , they are going to try to do the same linking idea as for ELL students.  for Advanced Learning , they want to try to figure out what is a "real" ALO and what guidelines are given for schools that want ALOs.  Good question but you'd think AL would be able to answer that one right now.  Kay said she wants to see consistency in ALOs.  Tracy said the IB process at RBHS is moving along well. for International Education , they have feeder patterns set up except for needed two more elementaries for Denny.  The Superintendent said these woul...

A reader asked for a thread about the status of their out of attendance area siblings getting in this year. I know we did hear from a Denny/Sealth reader in the Open Thread Friday this week who said the waitlist at Sealth had not moved at all.  The reader who made this suggestion had a troubling story out of Bagley Elementary so I hope she will repeat it here.  Apparently parents who wanted the Montessori program at Bagley were told it would be better to apply for the regular program and are now languishing on the regular list and somehow out of area parents are getting into the Montessori program.  It sounds very frustrating.  What are you seeing?

There was a request for this topic which we don't talk much about anymore.   I think there's some reasons why.  One, I think the racial tie-breaker left a bitter taste in a lot of people's mouths (and it cost us a lot of money to fight it all the way to the Supreme Court - wonder what that final bill was?)   Two, we have a neighborhood plan and we need a few years to see what, if any, difference we see in racial diversity at our schools.  Three, we have had little use for the Open Choice seats at the high schools.  That would be one big way to have more diversity - whether racial or socio-economic - get into the high schools.  I'll have to ask Tracy for a breakdown of those seats this year but if there are more than 25 in the whole district, I'd be surprised.  From our readers: What counts as diversity? Income disparities, the blending of poor, middle class, and rich? Homosexual or heterosexual parents at home? First generation ...

What did we see this week? The Board passed the Transition plan which apparently, instead of being just a guide through one year, is rewritten NSAP material . Meaning, they have taken away choice via Open Choice seats. I sincerely doubt that after a couple of years of "transition", the Open Choice seats policy will go back to how it was written in the Board-approved NSAP. Keep this in mind because it means both the district and the Board will promise, say and write one thing as policy and then change it whenever they want. This is deeply troubling. One member of the leadership team apparently forgot to publicly disclose something he should have. I am very disappointed but not surprised. If the Superintendent went along for months believing she was above disclosure, it would follow that others might feel the same way. (I'm giving it a couple of days to see if a correction is made.) Directors Carr and Maier are having community meetings tomorrow, both at Bethany Comm...

I attended the press conference today about the Transition Plan for 2011-2012. Tracy Libros was there along with the new(ish) head of Customer Service, Brandon Holst and Teresa Whipple of Public Affairs. The media was represented (in person) by me, Phyllis Fletcher of KUOW and Jerry of KING-5 tv. (By the way, I think KING-5, followed by KIRO-7, do the best job for tv coverage. KOMO and KCPQ always seem awol on these issues.) On the phone were reporters from the West Seattle blog, PI-online, Seattle's Child and The Stranger. Two of the most important things before Q&A. Again, as I posted previously, the deadline for issues/concerns to Board members in order to create amendments is FRIDAY, JAN. 7th (tomorrow), not Monday, the 10th. Steve Sundquist abruptly changed this date. Second, I asked and Tracy verified the following point. There used to be an amendment to the enrollment plan called the Waldman/Barnhart amendment. Basically it was a hold safe amendment. Yo...

I attended the NE Regional Meeting on the NSAP transition plan last night. I estimated at least 65 people in attendance. Tracy Libros of Enrollment led the meeting with Phil Brockman, NE Executive Director for the NE there as well as Ann Chan, the new Chief Talent Officer (although I note that the district doesn't label that office as such). I would have loved to talk with her about TFA but not enough time. I did manage to hand out information about TFA to about 25 people and only one of them had heard of it (and he was a teacher). I had to leave before the "reports out" but here's what I wrote Tracy: I think maybe you should not do as big/long an overview. I think parents were confused and it seemed to take a lot of time. It's not that it wasn't good information but I think parents want the time to ask questions and/or discuss. I think the number of transition plan topics are too many. I think you should be asking about geographic zones, open ch...

I was unable to attend the Board Work Session today on the budget. The PowerPoint is available and it has quite a bit of interesting information (which I'm sure was much better fleshed out at the meeting). There is another Board Work Session on the budget on April 8th. Items of interest (or amusement or annoyance, take your pick): for whatever reason, staff always has at least 2-3 pages of high-minded rhetoric. The Board knows what they are doing and why they are doing it (meaning, why this district exists and what they are trying to accomplish) and yet staff puts these pages in. For example, at the bottom of page 5 there's this (what I would call) mission statement: We are mindful of the impacts of the current budget crisis and will work thoughtfully and diligently to obtain the best outcomes possible for our students. Okay, thanks. Page 5 also has the guiding principles for the budget decisions including: Ensure lean, healthy infrastructure exists to support instruct...

After 3 hours the Work Session finally got to boundary discussions. This included the PowerPoint as well as a sheet which I haven't found yet online. One side as high school enrollment, overall and by clusters (which is very interesting) and the other side has what Tracy termed "dummy data" to illustrate what might patterns might occur because of the new SAP. As Tracy said, this is very complex. They listed 8 steps to the boundary planning process (slide 53). Then slide 54 listed the first step - Identify Factors (like proximity, walk zones, demographics, etc.) As I have previously said, t he Board is not going to rank or weigh any of these so you may think proximity is the most important but that's not how it will be for the Board. Keep that in mind. (I'll have an update on the proximity issue. As Tracy ran through it, I had a scenario in my head. I e-mailed her to ask her if I got it right and I'm waiting for an answer. Basically she said they are ...