Seattle Schools Community Forum

The last of the " Technology Vision Town Halls " will be tonight , starting at 6 pm at West Seattle High School.  Has anyone attended one?  Any thoughts?  Was student data privacy mentioned? Also to note, Friday, March 6th is the LAST day of Open Enrollment .  So hop to it if you haven't enrolled your student yet.  There is also an Operations Ctm meeting on Tuesday , the 3rd.  Agenda here .  It is likely to be a truncated meeting as Director Patu, the chair, is not available due to the death of her husband.  The agenda appears to be just capital matters. Then, Wednesday , there's Board meeting.  Agenda available here. One Action item (total) and that's the 2015 Board Code of Conduct.  Here's the redlined one and there are changes both good and puzzling.

A great short film  by filmmaker Michael Elliott with many diverse parents voices explaining about how their children are reacting, their own insights into researching the PARCC test and how they are saying no. Worth less than 5 minutes of your time to watch.

These people need to get to Starbucks and stat! so they can wake up and smell the coffee. From the NW Progressive : Proving once again that their Fund education first rhetoric is nothing but a false front, Republicans today pushed a bill through the Washington State Senate that transfers sales tax revenue collected on transportation projects out of the state’s general fund and into its highway fund. Since the general fund principally pays for our schools and universities, the bill would effectively take money away from education and put it towards laying asphalt instead.

I'm following up on the story about a blind parent who is suing the district over changes to the district's website that does not allow her to access her students' information (and the company who created the website is now being sued by the district, with finger-pointing in both directions). As part of the settlement for recent litigation regarding website accessibility, our website provider agreed to migrate our public website to their latest software by Mar. 1 of this year. This migration only affects the district’s main web pages and the school websites for John Muir Elementary School, Washington Middle School and Garfield High School. In addition, the contract for our current website hosting services was terminated by the vendor and the district is seeking a new service provider. (Those are some pretty random school pages.  It would appear this fix is for the sight-challenged parent's effort to keep up with her students' work but what happens t...

The two biggest public education stories seem to be the opt-out movemen t and the reauthorization of NCLB. 

According to this story in the Seattle Times , State schools superintendent Randy Dorn is threatening to withhold funding if Seattle's Nathan Hale High School doesn't administer the SBAC tests to 11th graders.

At the Work Session on the City's preschool plan, we learned that Director Patu's husband, Von Paul Patu, passed away.  It was noted by President Carr that she would be gone for a few weeks. Mr. Patu was a frequent speaker at Board meetings in my early years as an activist.  He and Betty were tireless activists for the Pacific Islander community, especially students. Von Paul and Betty were recently recognized by the  University of Washington Alumni Association – Multicultural Alumni Partnership (UWAA – MAP) for their work. My deepest sympathies to Director Patu and her family.