Seattle Schools Community Forum

Another week, another Friday Memo . Read this to the end for the best part.

A very busy week before the holiday break next week.

The district requested that I provide these updates for clarity.

There was an interesting story from Inside Bainbridge about Bainbridge Island School district about some volunteers who were youth pastors.  An investigation was launched and the district has promised to improve its volunteer screening.  The story was about a middle school where three evangelical youth pastors had been volunteering over the last year, mostly in the lunchroom and at registration.  There were several issues to this story.

Parents, you REALLY are giving to your schools. From Education Week (bold mine) : It turns out that schools are hotbeds of civic volunteerism, and parents are the lifeblood of that activity. So says a study released recently by the Corporation for National and Community Service , in partnership with the National Conference on Citizenship . The study showed that volunteerism in America is at a five-year high , and parents of school-aged children volunteer at a higher rate than the overall population . These parents contributed more than 2.5 billion hours of their time to volunteer efforts in 2011, most of it to school-based projects. The rate of parents volunteering in 2011 was 33.7 percent. While this was a nearly negligible increase (0.1 percentage point) from the prior year, it certainly does add up. Some 22.7 million parents volunteered, and if the hours they devoted to their work were paid, it would be valued at $54 billion , the group calculates. I have n...

Today the Board will be holding a Work Session on the Board policies numbered in the 5000s.  The meeting is from 4-6 p.m. at headquarters.  These policies cover human resource matters so you might think it's only personnel issues.  It is but, of course, the SPS students and parents interact with teachers and staff so having awareness of these policies is important.  For example, volunteer athletic coaches for the district have to have a fingerprint check whereas regular volunteers only have to give a name and birthdate for the Washington State Patrol's WATCH program.  (When I was volunteering, everyone had to do a fingerprint check.)  I don't know why the district has changed this policy; it is more expensive to do fingerprint checks than the name/birthdate check. Keep in mind that with both, they are checking for criminal history conviction records only for the state of Washington.  Interestingly, the WA State Patrol website says: WASIS cann...

I got there about 5:10 p.m.  A lot of the Mayor's staff, district staff and a middle school rock band warming up.  For all those people, there was no one to officially greet you or tell you anything about the event.  (I get that they needed staff but seriously, it was a lot of people for a simple Q&A.)