Seattle Schools Community Forum

A couple of items came across my desk in the last 24 hours related to women, stereotypes and sexual assault.  One is a powerful video   from Tumwater High School , part of the No More campaign.  As Tumwater's counselor, Todd Caffey, explains, they used national statistics to extrapolate to THS' female student population as "actual data on THS is not available."  Meaning, the district either isn't keeping these stats (which I know cannot be true) or would not give them to Mr. Caffey.  That in itself is quite powerful - the district has to report these stats to the state and feds.  I know - from research I was doing just yesterday - that this data also goes to the federal Office of Civil Rights. The video is quite simple; there are boys, one-by-one, who hold up a sheet with a number and explain the number of girls in each class in the high school who will likely be sexually assaulted. One thing they leave out in their list of who these girls are - th...

KING-5 did a report on our growing district.   (And, if you hadn't heard, Seattle is apparently the fastest growing big city in the country.  It is the 21st biggest city in the country.)  KING reported that the district expects to have 60,000 students by 2020 .  That's just five-and-a-half years away.  In a very sad story from The Charlotte Observer, a charter school in Charlotte, NC, is closing immediately for financial reasons and now the 300+ students have to find somewhere else to finish the school year. What makes this story doubly sad is that state officials knew this charter was off-track financially almost from the start of the school year.   North Carolina charter supporters pushed to get their charter cap lifted and this was one of the first of 23 schools opened that year.  The state Office of Charter Schools sent staff to inspect the school in March. The team reported concerns with the instruction and the support for students ...