Seattle Schools Community Forum

My daughter, an 8th grader at Washington, brought home a Garfield High School registration packet yesterday. It included a welcome letter from the principal, a ninth grade course options sheet, a registration calendar showing dates for next week, a sign-up form for Garfield music, a sign-up form for Garfield choir and vocal jazz, a sign-up form for double period math, information on the summer bridge program, and a registration guide and course description book. It was a lot. Only thing, my daughter has no intention of enrolling at Garfield. Garfield was her default assignment, but she opted for Open Enrollment and did not name Garfield on her list of school choices. The folks at the Enrollment Office say that Garfield is just trying to get out in front of the curve and that this neither indicates that my daughter has been assigned to Garfield nor does it put students who will enter Garfield through Open Enrollment at any sort of disadvantage. The person at the Enrollment Office said t...

At the Roosevelt Choices night last week, it was announced that the process for setting up class schedules has changed (at least at RHS for this year). Normally, most schools send counselors out to middle schools and walk students through the process. However, RHS is going send out registration materials as always but instead of going to the schools will be having a registration night in June. (And a letter will be in the registration materials explaining this.) The rationale for this is that the assignments are coming so late that the counselors were worried about getting out to all the middle schools (because going to just a few sends the wrong message) AND getting all the seniors out the door. In some ways this may be better because the middle school visits were during the day and some parents were unhappy that they weren't there with their kids to work on registration. Our head counselor thinks the other high schools may be staying on course for how they register freshman bu...