Seattle Schools Community Forum

Update: Former state legislator, Larry Seaquist, has dropped out of the race for state superintendent.   He has decided to try to shore up Dems in the state House. 

To note: SPS has just announced the start of a K-5 English Language Arts (ELA) instructional materials adoption.  The district is pretty fa  behind on putting current, standards-aligned instructional materials into classrooms district-wide.  The last formal ELA adoptions for elementary schools were basal readers in 2002 and Balanced Literacy in 2004.

Demography Talk The talk by SPS demographer, Dr. Natasha Rivers, on January 29th didn't have much new information.  She stated that there are links to her reports at the SPS page on demography. To note: - the district is definitely working with the City on housing trends - she stated that the district had thought they would grow by 1,000 students as they had in previous years but only gained 336.  That number seems much lower than I recall from the fall. - fun fact: the average age for new mothers in Seattle is 32 and for fathers it's 35. - the growth in SPS is not equally scattered.  Most of the growth is in the NE/NW, some in the Central area but down somewhat in the SW and especially down in the SE.

The Executive Committee meetings are usually pretty boring and uneventful. They are generally about scheduling and such. The meeting this week, however, has a couple of intriguing items on the agenda . 1. Call to Order 8:00am - Approval of agenda - Approval of August 7, 2012 meeting minutes 2. Review of the September 19 and October 3 legislative session agendas 3. Government Relations 4. Community Engagement 5. Executive Committee Discussion - Conditional Certification Application (R. English) - Creative Approach Schools (R. English) - Review and approval of retreat agenda - Proclamation for Cheryl Chow - Presentations to the Board - Policy Development Process - Board meeting times/Comment timing (Board and Student) - NSBA Membership 4/1/13-3/31/14 - Directors’ 2012-13 Conference Attendance - Superintendent Evaluation - Board Calendar/Work Plan 6. A...

The 5:00pm start time for public testimony is a barrier to participation by working people. The board can reduce that barrier by shifting the whole meeting agenda thirty minutes later. The meeting would start thirty minutes later, public testimony would start thirty minutes later, and the meeting would end thirty minutes later. The Board would have to weigh the negative impact of the change on the internal stakeholders against the positive impact for members of the public. The board could also resolve the problem by restoring Petitions and Delegations. It was not that long ago that there were two opportunities for the Board to hear from the public at each board meeting. One was public testimony when people could address motions before the Board. The other was Petitions and Delegations when people could speak on any topic. When the Board consolidated the two speaking periods they promised that, if the change created negative impacts, the Board would restore the second session. Petit...

 This week has a large number of Executive Sessions (closed to the public) for the Board.  Most are on " Evaluate a complaint against a public employee ."  I suspect some of these may be about schools in the news over the last several months who had principal issues.  Wednesday, June 6th School Board Meeting - Agenda Our first Board meeting that starts at 4:15 p.m. with the Speakers List at 5:00 p.m .  Please remember to give testimony, you should call/write tomorrow morning starting at 8 am -  252-0040 or boardagenda@seattleschools.org. The Board will run through the Consent agenda, student presentation, and superintendent comments by 5 p.m.  Then there is Public Testimony, Board comments and then Business Action Items. The agenda has some interesting items.  To note:

For all of their fancy talk about community engagement, the School Board has the worst community engagement of any department in the District. Imagine a principal who conducted community engagement by holding two sessions a month, during which no more than 19 people could speak to the principal for no more than two minutes each. The principal would not respond to anything said, not at the session and not afterwards by phone, mail, email, or in person. People could, of course, send the principal email, but the principal wouldn't reply in 90% of the cases. Nor would the principal reply to 90% of voice mail messages. That's it. That's the entire community engagement effort from the principal. Would that be acceptable to anyone? Could a program manager conduct community engagement like that? Of course not. Could the superintendent? One of them tried and was constantly hounded by the Board to expand and improve her community engagement. They should have removed the beam f...

The issue of making the School Board meetings more productive continues.   (It is also the issue of productive for whom?  Are Board meetings for the Board to do business or an event where the public can learn about the business of the school district?)  Also to note, why can't the Board comments be three minutes? They already cut the speaker time from 3 to 2 minutes starting at tomorrow's Board meeting.  Now, it's the start-time of the Board meetings .  At the Executive Committee meeting, a handout showed four options for Board meetings plus what other districts do, both regionally and nationally.  What other districts do varies wildly. But now there are five options listed (versus the four on the handout at the meeting).   Three of them have testimony starting before 6 p.m. which I can't see at all as many people work until 5 or 5:30 p.m.  The other two options have it starting at 7 p.m. but that's AFTER all the agenda items have ...