Seattle Schools Community Forum

This is important. This is, I think, one of the greatest things any Seattle School Board has ever done. I'm looking forward to how it ends and I'm optimistic that it will end well. Here's the quick version: A family applied for assignment to an Option School for their student with disabilities. While other general education students were assigned to the school, the District maintained a separate assignment queue for students with disabilities and set a capacity for students with disabilities at the school. In the end, the student was not assigned to the Option School. The family complained that the assignment process was discriminatory. Their complaint was denied at a variety of lower levels and appealed, eventually, to the Board. Here's the Board's decision .

Another week, another Friday Memo . This week's memo has some interesting bits including:

Update:  here's the schedule for the district boundary meetings - there are only three and they are all less than a hour. Thornton Creek K-5 lunchroom Tues., Oct. 1, 2015, 6:30 - 7:15 p.m. 7711 43rd Ave NE Interpreters: Chinese and Spanish Schmitz Park Elementary lunchroom Mon., Oct. 5, 2015, 6:30 - 7:15 p.m. 5000 SW Spokane Street Interpreters: Spanish, Somali and Vietnamese Seattle World School Meany Building lunchroom Tues., Oct. 6, 2015, 6:30 - 7:15 p.m. 301 21st Ave E Interpreters: Chinese, Spanish, Somali and Vietnamese Also, a link to the map of the look of SPS in 2020 - wow is the word that comes to mind for those high school assignments.   It says it was approved in Nov 2013 and last updated 9/14/2015.  If you are in PTA, I would go to my PTA/PTO leaders and ask that this be a topic of discussion.  

I finally had the opportunity to look over the Work Session presentation on " Resource Stewardship" and "LEAN." I don't really like PowerPoint presentations and understand that they are general outlines with the presenter to fill the points.  But I found this a confusing presentation. One, I felt there was a lot of filler.  I am big on getting to the point so explaining that improving processes would help with both the bottom line and customer service. Two, page 5 says there was a School Leader Survey in 2015.   How did staff get this done less than two weeks into the new year?  If  this was truly done in 2015, then kudos to them.  But another issue on the same page is what do these colors mean?  I know red is probably bad but again, not clear. Then there's the issue of LEAN.  Page 6 says "Define Value..from a Customer Perspective!."  That may work for business but if you ask a parent what "value" from their child's school m...

By request.  Discuss among yourselves.

The C & I meeting on Monday began with a change to the agenda. An update on Advanced Learning was added as an eighth discussion item.

Monday, August 12 Curriculum and Instruction Policy Committee Mtg , 4-6 pm.  Agenda A lot of BARs for various partnerships with outside entities for services.  One, for Special Ed services via the Northwest School of Innovative Learning, caught my eye because I know they were being sued in 2011while a student in the Puyallup School District was in their school.  The student's family alleged physical mistreatment.  Might be good if the Directors know the outcome of that lawsuit. Also, some discussion scheduled for Policy 313, Student Assignment, Policy 2015, Selection/Adoption of Instructional Materials and Policy 2415, High School Graduation Requirements.   Wednesday, August 14th Executive Committee Meeting - 8:30-10 am.  Agenda Review of the upcoming Board meetings for August 21st and September 4th. Discussion around amending Policy 1400 and Policy 6114, and the next Board Retreat. Policy 1400 is "Meeting Conduct, Order of Business and Quorum....

From SPS: School assignment information for the 2012-13 school year will be available to families beginning April 16 on the District’s enrollment website (www.seattleschools.org/enrollment) or by accessing an automated phone line at (206) 252-0212. You will need the student’s school ID number and birth date. Assignment letters will follow the week after spring break for all students who submitted an Open Enrollment application.

There isn't a lot of change in the student assignment plan for 2012-2013 and what is there is mostly a result of the capacity management failure  crisis.

My, but this was a year of change for Seattle Public Schools. Change at the top. The biggest news of the year was the sudden dismissal of the superintendent, Dr. Maria Goodloe-Johnson. The Board, which had dragged their feet from June to March in response to the State Auditor's report, acted expeditiously between their receipt of a report from an internal investigation of the Regional Small Business Development Program and their decision to fire the superintendent. We can make all kinds of conjecture about why the Board decided to fire her, but we need to give strong credence to their stated reason: they no longer felt that they could trust her. Dr. Goodloe-Johnson had been losing the Board's trust bit by bit in a number of other incidents over the course of the previous three years. The "Pottergate" scandal was just the last step - a big one - that took her over the line. Dr. Goodloe-Johnson was fired "without cause" and took a year's pay (over a qua...

Here's a link to the SPS webpage. The automatic enrollment/waitlist number is 252-0410 - you must have student's ID # and birthdate. (Thanks to all for the updates.)  

Our friends at the West Seattle blog have some good stories from West Seattle schools.

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...

There's a story getting national attention about a mother in Ohio who was convicted of a felony and jailed for using a false address to send her kids to a safer/better school. Now that the Seattle School District is making it even tougher for families to avoid their neighborhood schools, one has to wonder if we'll be seeing more of these sort of enforcement actions around here. I'm finding some of the comments about this story on several news sites to be instructive and frightening.

This is a long direct quote from pages 5 and 6 of the New Student Assignment Transition Plan for 2011-2012 , which the Board will vote on in January: E. Students Who Move When students move, they may have the option or be required to get a new school assignment, depending on when and where they move. In general, students must change to their new attendance area schools if: • They are assigned to their attendance area school, are not grandfathered, and they move to a new attendance area. If they move before the school year starts, they must change schools immediately. If they move during the school year, they may finish the year at their current school, but they must change schools the next year. In general, students may change to their new attendance area school if: • They have a grandfathered or choice assignment, are in grades K‐8, and they move outside of their assigned school’s service area. • They have a grandfathered or choice assignment, are in grades 9‐12, and they m...

(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...

As we have discussed the steps that the District might take to reduce the overcrowding at Garfield, there is an option that hasn't gotten as much discussion as relocating some or all of APP: boundary changes. I think most of us presumed that any boundary change to right-size the Garfield attendance area would involve only the southern boundary, shifting some kids from Garfield to Franklin. But that's not the way the District saw it. The District version has the northern and western boundaries shifting as well, moving Montlake kids into the Roosevelt attendance area and some downtown families moving into the Ballard attendance area. Montlake families should know that this option is on the table and they should voice their needs and preferences.

::::UPDATE - I have changed the proposed APP cap at Garfield from 90 to 110.::::: Let's not kid ourselves. The District is going to do something about Garfield and what they are going to do is limit APP access to the school. The full weight of reducing the overcrowding at Garfield will fall on APP. Even though the growth of APP has had almost nothing to do with the enrollment explosion at Garfield. This was their intent from the start and it is the reason that they drew the Garfield attendance area as they did. They want to break up APP because the District improves school test scores by re-arranging the distribution of high performing students - not by actually improving outcomes for students. So what do I think they will do? In the constrained universe that begins with the presumption of capped APP enrollment at Garfield, here's what I think would be the best possible outcome: The District staff will recommend that high school APP be split and the Board will concur. T...

The Board met to get background on the Transition Plan decisions for the coming year. The meeting was strictly informational - there wasn't any discussion to speak of. Dr. Libros just ran through the long stack of slide one after the other bang, bang, bang. Here's a link to the PowerPoint. Here are some interesting points. 1. Nevermind what you thought the Capacity Management Policy says or what you thought the District would report about Capacity Management in the fall. The District staff won't even set the criteria or the metrics for capacity management until February or March of next year so there will not be a real Capacity Management Report this fall. Expect nothing from them. 2. Don't expect much Community Engagement. It's already November. It will soon be Thanksgiving and then Christmas and winter break and the Board will get their motion at the first meeting in January and vote on it in mid-January, so there just won't be any time for Community ...

Lots to report from the Regional meeting last night but that's for later. Right now, I have a question about the NSAP that I wanted to put out there before I write to Tracy in Enrollment. I was talking with some parents and was told, by two of them, that they got their child's assignment to Roosevelt just before school started. They both said they got in on the 10% set-aside seats, not waitlist movement. I was a bit startled because I would have thought the 10% set-aside lottery happened months ago. Does anyone have anything they know about the NSAP to explain this? Why would the lottery be held in the last few days before school?