Seattle Schools Community Forum

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?

Tracy Libros was kind enough to send this link along. She said she doesn't have a report on waitlisted non-attendeance area K sibs. There is also a link to checking a student's waitlist status. Both these links, along with other info, are at the Enrollment Information page .

Thanks to StepJ who let us know the district had posted a document about the kindergarten sibling waitlists . There are 148 siblings on the waiting lists for schools that are not their attendance area school. There is a fairly even city-wide distribution of siblings who didn't get their sibling assignment with the largest for Kimball at 19 and John Hay at 18. Here's the document summary : "The following chart shows results for non-attendance area K siblings who applied for their sibling’s attendance area school during Open Enrollment. In summary: • 556 non-attendance area K students applied for their older sibling’s school.2 • 73% of these applicants (408 students) were assigned to their sibling’s school. • 27% of these applicants (148 students) are on waiting lists for their sibling’s school. These results are in addition to: • Students assigned to their attendance area school their older sibling attends. • 132 K siblings assigned to the Option School their older si...

In their never-ending quest to explain to us how wise all the district/Board's decisions are, the Times had an editorial on the grandfathering of siblings. I love the title, " Sibling Preference, Yes, but no guarantees" simply because the district's previous goal had been to keep siblings together so there is some irony that is lost on the Times. "The Seattle School Board isn't unsympathetic to parents with more than one child in the public schools, but the board is right to make no guarantees that siblings can be with older brothers and sisters when new school assignments take place next fall. These parents are caught between a rock and a hard place. Participating in two schools can be inconvenient." I think inconvenient is an understatement for many families. Now the Times manages to leave a couple of things out. They mention the steps the district is taking to manage enrolling as many sibs as possible but leave out the possibility that some scho...

I attended and spoke at the Public Hearing for the SAP Boundaries last night. All the Board were in attendance as well as the Superintendent. The newly-elected Board members were not there and I saw no press that I recognized. The testimony was audio-taped. I would say there were roughly 50-60 people in attendance (not a big crowd at all). I won't go thru every single person's speech (there were 40 including me). Here are some highlights: number one with a bullet (again); grandfathering of siblings . Parents just have such uncertainty about what to do and how they could handle two little children (or more) at two schools. I spoke to this issue in my remarks saying, on the subject of reopening Sand Point, Old Hay and McDonald that all should open as K-5s in order to give those parents the option to have their children in one school. The issue is quite pressing in the NE as many parents may not be able to move Child 1 from an out-of-attendance area school to their new...

But first, huge thanks to parent Eric Artzt and his fine website where he has gathered a lot of SPS data useful to parents. It's at Seattle School Facts . Thank you to our reader, Owlhouse, for posting this elsewhere. I wanted it to be front and center here. Second, I had followed a link about a petition to keep siblings together and found this website , Keep Our Kids Together . They have gathered data together about siblings that I think should inform the Board's discussions on this issue. They discuss the so-called "sibling tail" issue which is the concern by the district that if there is unlimited grandfathering of siblings, those siblings would hang on in a non-attendance school (thereby creating the "tail") for years and undermining the neighborhood schools goal of the SAP. I think they make some very good points about why the "tail" wouldn't be as affective as the district thinks. There is also a document that I received at the Ecks...

So we've been having quite a lively discussion over the issue of the sibling tiebreaker in the new SAP. First, to be clear (and this was reiterated by Tracy Libros at the last Board meeting), there was a sibling tiebreaker in the last plan. There will be a sibling tiebreaker in this plan. There was never a sibling preference but somehow that got to be part of the lingo. People always thought if your child had a sibling coming into the school while your first child was still going to be there next year, that the sibling would automatically get in. No, it meant if a school was oversubscribed, the first tiebreaker was sibling. There was no automatic in but that was as close as it got. The new plan turns that around by saying the attendance area kids get in first and, if the school is oversubscribed and still has seats, the tiebreaker would be sibling for any spots available. But I hear a lot of people say this sibling preference stuff. It doesn't exist. In fact, here...

So from a previous thread I saw a number of posts I wanted to address so we can suss out this sibling thing. (Although we do need to have a discussion about charter schools. Suffice to say, charters have no real definable qualities except that someone starts them using a school district's money. Every state has totally different rules on how they run, how they can be closed, how many can be open, etc. So to say you get more autonomy from charters could be true or might be false. We don't have a law here in Washington State so you have to figure it out from the other 42 states that do.) Siblings. Let's see if we can agree on a few things. If there is to be an implementation period, maybe make it a real period of time so that people can adjust. Grandfather in siblings for two years. AND THAT'S IT. Look folks, this could go on forever. Some families have more than one sibling or some people now have a kindergartener and a baby. So that means in 4 years we still ...