Seattle Schools Community Forum

The Board Directors are busy attending high school graduations this week so the district is fairly light on meetings. There will be a Work Session with the topic "Strategic Plan Refresh" on Wednesday before the Board meeting . The Work Session is from 4-5:30 p.m. with the Board meeting starting at 6 p.m. There are no presentation materials yet available.

The Seattle Public Schools is updating and adjusting the Strategic Plan with input from teachers, principals, parents, families, and members of our community. Please visit the following survey link to provide feedback to Seattle Public Schools:   https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/SPS_Strategic_Plan_Survey_Spring_2011 The survey consists of 21 questions and has been extended to Thursday, June 2. Responses to the survey will remain confidential and anonymous.  For questions about the survey, please email performance@seattleschools.org. Seattle Public Schools Family Survey Additionally, the SPS Research, Evaluation and Assessment department will send out the 2010-2011 Family Survey by phone and e-mail starting on June 4. The survey will first be sent to families who have elementary students, then middle, and finally high school. There will be one phone call and an e-mail correspondence. If you prefer the e-mail correspondence you will have 4 days to complete the survey o...

The District invites the public to fill out a survey regarding District's Strategic Plan. Seattle Public Schools is updating and adjusting the Strategic Plan with input from teachers, principals, parents, families, and members of our community. Please visit the following survey link to provide feedback to Seattle Public Schools: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/SPS_Strategic_Plan_Survey_Spring_2011 . The survey consists of 21 questions and will close on Tuesday, May 31. Responses to the survey will remain confidential and anonymous. For questions about the survey, please email performancemanagement@seattleschools.org . There are some trick questions here. 1. As you envision Seattle Public Schools in the year 2013, for what would you like it to be widely known and respected? They list some possible responses, but I answered "providing interventions for struggling students, challenge for advanced learners, and rigor and support for all students." 5. What kinds of...

The Board is getting yet another Strategic Plan work session this afternoon from 4:00 to 5:30 before the regular legislative meeting that starts at 6:00. The Strategic Plan work session continues to re-cover the same territory that the previous Strategic Plan work sessions ( 4/13/11 , 3/23/11 )have covered without exploring the ground that a lot of us have wanted to see covered. We want to see some explanation of how the Strategic Plan has changed over time. We want to see a budget for each project in the plan. We want some accountability for the total failure to fulfill the community engagement protocols. No one on the Board has spoken to any of these. The Board members still do not venture off the script that the staff has set for them. The regular legislative meeting has three action items and twelve items for introduction. None of them had any community engagement done on them. Not even the homework policy or the promotion policy. All of the actions before the Board should...

Not much happening this week in SPS meetings but many education events this month.

I attended the first half-hour of the Strategic Plan Refresh work session yesterday before I had to leave. I don't think I missed anything. The meeting was an utter waste. The staff trotted out a bunch of meaningless jargon and the Board acted like bobbleheads. There was nothing to decide and damn little to even talk about. There was no serious discussion of what is in the Strategic Plan, how it is working, what it costs, or whether we should continue it. The District staff still refuses to provide a comprehensive list of the projects and initiatives in the Strategic Plan. The list of projects and initiatives continues to be in flux. New efforts magically appear while others sink out of sight. The Audit Response, for example, is now a Strategic Plan project, but STEM and capacity management have slipped off the list. This is really frustrating. I don't understand how the Board tolerates it. I want to see what I was promised: The final words of the Strategic Plan, sa...

Tuesday Audit and Finance Committee Mtg , 4-6 p.m.   This meeting will focus on Audit issues.  There are several debriefings like IA meetings with the City, discussion with Don McAdams (a district consultant), salary benchmarks and internal audit manager posting.  Wednesday Executive Committee Mtg , 8 am-10am.   Quite a packed agenda .   Materials adoptions for LA, Social Studies and music instruction, academic calendars, consulting services for TIF, ethics agreement with the City and partnering with the City, community engagement, and a raft of discussion items like superintendent evaluation, CFO/COO search process, protocol for following up on public testimony (really?) and much more.  There's also some sort of amendment to a contract at Denny/Sealth to rebuild the previously torn out tennis courts/softball field.  (You remember this one - it's a rebuild of something we paid for under BTA II.)  Looks like more money. It's a...

The panel last night was Steve Sundquist, Sherry Carr, Pegi McEvoy (COO), Robert Boesche (CFO) and Dr. Enfield.   Peter Maier also attended but was not part of the panel.  Linda Shaw from the Times attended and there were about 30 people in the audience. The Seattle Council PTSA was very gracious in dispensing with the business part of the meeting and went right to comments from the panel and then questions.  It was an interesting format because you could submit a written question and, at the end, ask a question.  I had printed out all the budget questions I had received from my thread and gave it to the moderator.

The District is preparing a "Strategic Plan Refresh". They will review the Strategic Plan and decide which projects to continue, alter, defer, or remove. The refresh will have to include goals, timelines, status, and budgets for each of the projects. I spoke with Mark Teoh last night and asked if he could include two items in the Refresh program: 1) A record of the various projects in the Strategic Plan, including those that were originally in it, those that were added, those that were completed, and those that were simply dropped without notice. Remember how there was supposed to be an APP Review in the plan? Remember how there was going to be an alternative education review? These projects just silently faded away. At the same time, Capacity Management and World Language curricular alignment, which were not part of the original plan, have been added. 2) A review of the community engagement protocols and some table that shows which of the projects are meeting the requi...

I attended the quarterly Strategic Plan update this evening. It was, far and away, the best one ever. Credit for the clearer and more informative format goes to Mark Teoh, the new person in charge of the Strategic Plan. He said it was easy to present the information clearly. He didn't say that was true once the goal became to share information rather than horde it. The Board, except for Director Martin-Morris - who was silent throughout the presentation, was engaged and asked some good questions. The Powerpoint speaks for itself, so I'll just make a couple notes... On slide 8, Special Education, the District doesn't yet keep IEPs as electronic records, so it is extraordinarily difficult to measure or track the work. They are transitioning to an electronic format. It was noted that two schools experiencing a lot of progress and success, West Seattle Elementary and Highland Park Elementary, are using a "workshop" model in the classroom which allows the teache...

Monday the 21st Reminder of the lecture on water tonight at by Robert Glennon for the Chief Sealth Int'l High School World Water Week.  Doors open at 6:15 for music and refreshments with the lecture at 7 p.m.  Robert Glennon is the author of "Unquenchable: America's Water Crisis and What To Do About It." Tuesday There is a discussion at Jane Addams about serving their advanced learners .   This meeting is a Jane Addams school community discussion around how best to serve their advanced learners. Current Jane Addams families, and families considering the school are welcome to join the conversation.  It runs from 6:30-7:30 p.m. in the library.  Please note this is school event (not district) with the discussion about Jane Addams only. Wednesday Oversight Work Session on Human Resources Department from 4-5:30 p.m.  This should be interesting as I haven't seen a work session on human resources previously.  Then there is an half-hou...

Ballard teacher, Eric Muhs, has a survey that was developed to receive input on the Strategic Plan (but it's not just for teachers so take it if you'd like). Here's the info about it: Colleagues: after meeting with School Board member Micheal DeBell last week, he encouraged us to collect information about the “Strategic Plan” as developed and pursued under the auspices of the previous Superintendent. Specifically, he indicated interest to us, and at last week’s public School Board meeting, to shelve or postpone elements of the plan that have not been cost-effective or successful. To that end, we made this survey. If you could take a few moments to answer it, that would be much appreciated. The information may help Mr. DeBell as he attempts to get the Board to revisit some of the decisions made over the last few years. Here’s the survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/DDT3NNV Also, Eric and another Ballard teacher, India Carlson, had participated in a Seattl...

I am going to create a one-sheet list of my suggestions for easy reading but here it is fleshed out. (I'll have the one-sheeter by the end of the evening.) As a preamble to what I would suggest the district should cut, I make these disclaimers: I have looked through all the documents available for 2011-2012 budgeting. They do not follow in a real and coherent fashion so it is not really possible to discern exactly what staff is saying. There was an initial listing , followed by another presentation and the Strategic Plan Budget Planning Tool followed by the Budget Balancing tool . I can't tell if the planning tools overlap. I know that the Board pushed back on some initial ideas (like selling the radio station at Hale) so naturally it fell to staff to look at other areas. Staff is right about the difficulty of planning when there are unknowns looming. What will the economic update forecast be on March 17th? What will labor partners have to say? I am going wi...

As previously noted, there is another Budget Work Session today from 4-5:30 pm, just prior to the School Board meeting. I finally did get a couple of other handouts that were at the previous meeting. One is the Strategic Plan Budget Planning Tool. This breaks out the Strategic Plan by area with areas marked with red, yellow and green for stop, pause, go. ( The other one is one I hadn't seen about per pupil spending at every school. I can't seem to figure out how to make this one link but I'll try to get it up.) I think the item I did link is the most important. I did e-mail the School Board today with a couple of questions which I asked them all to answer. (I rarely ask for a reply to my e-mails.) What I asked: 1) is there anything the Board, as a whole, has decided that is either on or off the table? For example, at Director Smith-Blum's community meeting she indicated that the Board had decided that sports cuts are off the table. (I found this interest...

I attended 4 hours of the Board Work Session on the 2011-2012 Budget. Unfortunately, the meeting was 5+ hours (maybe longer, Dorothy?) It was taped so I will try to get a link if you care to listen. I will write up my notes but for your reading pleasure here are the following: staff finally got information to the Board that I know the Board has wanted for a long time. This would be benchmarking comparisons to other districts (both local and out-of-state). This chart is for 2009-2010 expenditures and FTE comparisons in dollars. This chart is for 2009-2010 expenditures and FTE comparisons (as a % of total) My irritation with these is that this is information that should have been presented LONG ago. It overburdened an already long and heavily detailed meeting. District benchmark template The Powerpoint and another document - the Strategic Plan Budget Planning Tool for Fiscal Year 2011-2012 - are not yet up at the website. You'll want to see those as well but for now, the...

UPDATE: Here is the Powerpoint link. Item 8: There was some confusion/frustration over an item on page 12 ( Strategic Plans: Moving Forward ) about the item " School Performance Framework (to include MTSS) . Thanks to Kay who said, "What is MTSS?" Turns out that RTI is now MTSS ( multi-tiered system of support ; a response to intervention) Susan Enfield talked about using what they have learned works and taking it out to other schools. This generated a lot of discussion. The item has its original cost at $8.7M and its proposed cost at $0-3.1M. The focus here has been on Level 1 and 2 schools and the interventions scale-up for all schools. Duggan said that of the $5.2 current budget for 37 schools, they have revenue for $2.1M so they need $3.1M to keep up. But Sherry could not follow the bouncing dollar signs (I couldn't either). Duggan said the $8.7M is in the gap. MGJ said that in a Dece. 15th conversation (I believe it was another ...

Sorry this took so long. As I stated previously, I did not stay for the budget portion of the Work Session so this is only about the Strategic Plan. Here is a link to the presentation . Betty Patu was not there and so they recorded the meeting (both audio and video) so it should be available somewhere. Michael DeBell stated that this was to listen to the information but not to set any priorities. What ended up happening was that there were 88 slides to cover and yet for some reason they let the Family Engagement section go on for about 35 minutes. It was interesting info from each of the schools with a FEAT team (Family Engagement Action Team) but I didn't feel it was the right time to present it. So by the time Dr. Goodloe-Johnson got started, she really whipped through the slides. (I've stated in the past that I think the staff presentations are too long and I still believe that is true.) I stepped out as they went into 2010-2011 Governance Priorities starting on slide ...

I started this to go over my notes from the Work Session but got lost in this slide about what other districts we would like to emulate are doing. I took the time to look these districts up because I want to know what it is that that they do that the Superintendent thinks we should be doing. It's a mixed bag without further input from her. There was a slide (#6) from the Work Session handout referencing other districts making changes but no discussion about it. So let's review them: Gwinnett County, GA - right on their home page - winner of the 2010 $1M Broad prize. (It goes to the urban school district that has the strongest student achievement and improvement narrowing of the achievement gap. The money goes for high school seniors for college scholarships.) That said, a pretty impressive district. They have some mighty small high school class sizes. Good for them but how do they do it? This district has about 161,000 students. Boston - what's interesting...

Thanks to a West Seattle reader for notification of the link for today's Work Session presentation on the Strategic Plan. It is 88 PowerPoint pages that someone at SPS believes they will go thru, explain where needed and answer questions in an hour and a half. Raise your hand if you think this possible. Anyone? Naturally, I haven't read the whole tome but here's part of their page 5; Changing an entire system takes time. Over the last 2 ½ years, we have built a foundation for the work. Yes, they have built the foundation for the work...on a bog. Where is the solid foundation for how this district operates? There is virtually none. I have to wonder how long they think this can go on. Also, on page 6 they list this: We know from national experience that deliberate long term plans to improve student learning take time to show results. Districts who are successfully doing the work include Boston, Long Beach, Denver, Gwinnett County, GA, and Garden Grove, CA I really hav...

(Update on Wednesday Work Session: Spoke to Joan in the Board office. The Work Session is to be about the Strategic plan as it had been previously bumped by the Integrated planning work. This is a quarterly update on the SP.) Monday afternoon is the Curriculum and Instruction Policy Committee meeting from 4-6:30 p.m. in the Board conference room. The agenda reflects the following topics: alternative schools with Thornton Creek principal John Miner presenting professional development waiver/parent/teacher conference waiver - I believe this is about not making up the days missed due to snow Board policy on school attendance schools of innovation (Susan Enfield) textual materials adoption update course of study discussion newly enrolled students school assignment's (sic) The previously canceled NW Regional meeting on Student Assignment is tomorrow night, Monday, Dec. 13th at Ingraham High from 6:30-8:00 p.m. Tuesday , December 14th is last informal drop-in session on the Tra...