Seattle Schools Community Forum

There was an incident at Lincoln where a 20-year Special Ed student was thought to have a knife.  That triggered a shelter-in-place for about 15 minutes.  It turns out it was a plastic toy knife.  SPD responded and spoke to the student. SPD were called to the Rainier Beach area around 2:30 pm with a call of shots fired in the air by a guy who took off on foot.  This was at 50 Ave S and South Rose.  SPS put Dunlap, RBHS, South Shore Pk-8, Bailey Gatzert and South Lake on shelter-in-place while police checked out the scene.  (Bailey Gatzert was on shelter-in-place simply because an SPD officer happened to be visiting the school, heard the call and asked for it to be enacted until he/she had more info.)   This shelter-in-place was about 20 minutes and was not associated with any SPS student or staff member. 

A reader put up a letter from Queen Anne Elementary principal, David Elliott, that was written in light of yesterday's Seattle Pacific U shootings (QA Elementary is fairly close by as is Coe Elementary).  Mr. Elliott calmly explains what they did once the event became known to this (and this happened as school had just ended for the day). Apparently buses had left but there were many children and parents on the playground.  He made the parents aware of the situation.  He goes on:   After some time making sure we were aware of where all children and adults were on our campus I had time to call our SPS Security. I was informed that SPD had contacted our security department and informed them there were no schools in the vicinity and no calls needed. I was, and am, completely unsatisfied with that decision for us and for Coe, which is situated eight or nine blocks from the SPU campus. I will certainly follow up on this with both SPD and our SPS Security Depar...

A six-year-old calls Hasbro out on its Guess Who game (with 19 men and only 5 women on the game board).  They write back with a silly answer and her mom weighs in. A bipartisan bill has been introduced into the House of Representatives to cut down on high-stakes testing.  In the on-going debate about discipline, zero-tolerance discipline and how to keep a classroom orderly (while NOT suspending kids), an interesting article from Education Next.   One report, Discipline Disparities, has a lot of good info and says this: One oft-repeated justification for frequent suspensions is that schools must be able to remove the “bad” students so that “good” students can learn. There is no research to support this popular theory. To the contrary, when schools serving similar populations were compared across the state of Indiana, and poverty was controlled for, those schools with relatively low suspension rates had higher, not lower test scores. But two other studies ...