Latest News and Comment from Education

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

UPDATE: Seattle Schools Community Forum: Growth Boundaries and Trust

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Growth Boundaries and Trust:



Are you freakin' kidding me? 12% of students in APP?!

Per Rachel Cassidy, the District demographer, 12% of Seattle Public School students in grades 6 to 8 living in the McClure, Whitman, Hamilton, and Eckstein attendance areas are enrolled in middle school APP.

You read that right. 12% of north-end middle school students are in APP.

How can this be possible? The program is intended for students in the top 2% nationally for cognitive ability and 

What is the procedure for principal appointments?

There have been and will be a number of new principal appointments made for the coming school year. In some cases the school communities have been allowed to offer input on the selection of their principal. In some cases the school community has formed a hiring committee and interviewed candidates. In other cases, however, schools have been assigned a principal with little or no community input or engagement.

What is the process for a principal appointment? What are the factors that determine the community’s input in the process? Can anyone explain the wide differences in community engagement in this process? It has long 

Growth Boundaries and Trust

On June 1st, at the Board Retreat, there was a lot of talk about trust. Here's one statement from that event that I recall clearly:

"You cannot talk yourself out of a trust issue that you acted yourself into."

Everyone at the retreat - Board directors and senior staff - pledged themselves to building trust.


That was just a few weeks ago. Then, yesterday, we get a presentation from the senior staff, Board Work Session - Equitable Access, Growth Boundaries & Capacity Management, which is rife with dishonesty and deception.

I wrote to Mr. Tolley, the primary presenter at the work session, asking him for the current definitions for School, Service, Program, and curricular focus. I told him that the District has created a great deal of confusion with these terms. Some entities which meet the definition of one are classified as another. I also asked some specific 

Boundaries and Capacity Management Work Session

This Work Session had a larger-than-normal audience which is a good thing because now there are other witnesses to what was discussed.

Charlie and I both went and came armed with ideas for the Board to consider.  (He outdid me, of course, with his sheet with 23(!) questions.  He checked them off as they went along.  At least five of them got asked but not necessarily answered.)  I gave them a sheet with comments copped from Charlie's previous thread.

And, with apologies to all other programs, somehow Advanced Learning/Highly Capable got the lion's share of discussion.

Michael Tolley started the session, outlining the higher level thinking.  However, the presentation, on slide 3, says that one goal of the process is to "include access to services and programs as a key component in boundary revisions."  To which Charlie wrote in the margin "except Montessori."  And, he's right.  Montessori is