Seattle Schools Community Forum

A teacher-writer, Sean Riley, at The Stranger thinks so.  It's a pretty lengthy article but one that has good history that I hadn't heard before (not having grown up here.) In total, 10 of my 13 years in Seattle Public Schools involved long rides on a school bus. Between the ages of 6 and 9 alone, I logged thousands of miles looking at the city from a green vinyl seat. This is true for thousands of Seattleites. Seattle Public Schools used busing from the late 1970s through the mid-2000s in the hopes of achieving racial integration. To give just one snapshot of the program's breadth: In 1980, mandatory busing involved 12,000 of the district's 54,000 students. He has one pretty funny line (but I'm not sure if he meant it to be funny): It was watching the OJ verdict with black kids and getting so caught up, I joyfully sprinted in the halls with them for a second. 

Monday, December 3rd Community Meeting with Director McLaren from 6-8 p.m. at High Point Center, 6400 Sylvan Way SW Wednesday, December 5th Board Work Session On Capacity Management and NSAP/Transition from 4:00 -5:30 p.m.  No agenda yet available. I will note a few items related to these issues that may come up at the Work  Session that were discussed at the Operations Ctm meeting on November 15th. Tracy Libros noted that there may be potential impacts from "scheduled/approved sunsetting of transportation if students return to attendance area schools.   There are about 1800 students this could affect.  Hard to know if this would be a major impact as many parents might not choose to change schools for their student once they are established.  However, with the capacity crunch the district has, almost any number in the wrong place could be a problem.  One key spot is West Seattle Elementary where 109 students at other schools could possibly chose ...

Let's go through the Transition Plan amendments being proposed by Board Directors. Harium Martin-Morris I move that there be a one-year special program preference for Thornton Creek 5th graders applying to Salmon Bay as their first choice school, without transportation, with tiebreakers applied in the following sequence: 1.Sibling 2.Special program preference for Thornton Creek 5th graders 3.Geography 4. Lottery So this would keep TC students flowing to Salmon Bay. Of course, without transportation, how many will be able to make this choice? Maybe someone at TC could let us know what they think the rough numbers might be. Salmon Bay is less difficult to get into than it used and if more TC students didn't go, there'd be more spaces for other students. The accompanying chart shows that it truly varies from year to year where TC 5th graders go for middle school. Oddly, either the number got left off, but they give no numbers for how many TC 5th graders went to Eckstein f...

Tracy had 75 slides. Holy cow! She was very careful to try to cover every situation and it showed. Okay, what do we suppose is one the barriers to our NSAP and the transition? Yes, it's the VAX. Mr. Kennedy says they are making progress but it's still a problem and yes, they will be using it for assignments (hopefully) one last time. (Sherry really gave them an out by saying, "You'll let us - the Board - know if we bumps into any VAX issues in our questioning." I mean, you could blame the VAX for almost anything. Handy.) Slide 6 reflects "We are unable to support additional scope (scope creep). Coding is currently underway and changes would result in project failure and our inability to support Open Enrollment." Slide 8 started the discussion of the Transition Plan and I find it somewhat vague. This is for one year only and there will be subsequent transition steps in years to follow. How they follow depends on the enrollment patterns. The...