School Board Meeting Date: Sept. 7th, 2016 Pt.1

This is the main part of the video.

So, I'm going to go ahead and put it in the middle.

There it is.

I like to welcome everyone here today to our September 7th regular board meeting.

Today was a very exciting day, it's opening for a lot of our schools and had a great opportunity to visit six schools today and I know that Dr. Nyland also visit various schools so Today was a very amazing day to watch all the kids come back to school.

So welcome back and Ms. Ritchie roll call.

Director Blanford?

Here.

Director Burke?

Here.

Director Geary?

Here.

Director Harris?

Here.

Director Peters?

Here.

Director Pinkham?

Here.

Director Patu?

Here.

Can we all stand for pledge and allegiance?

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic which we stand, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

At this time we would like to recognize the team read program.

I invite director school and community partnership James Bush to the podium to make a few remarks.

Good afternoon.

So it is with my pleasure to recognize and bring forward Team Read to the podium to join me.

Team Read is one of our great partners with Seattle Public Schools.

The program supports over 350 students throughout the school district at 11 different schools.

Team Read is successful because they also work with 358th through 12th graders to provide leadership reading coaches and opportunities for them to engage with second and third graders.

Please meet Maureen Massey, director of team read and former reading coach and Franklin High School alumni Kierse Sanders did I get that right?

Who will both provide the board with more background information I wanted to devote most of the time for them to share their direct information and give Kierse as much time to share experience as possible.

Thank you.

Thank you so much and thank you so much for for inviting us here today and for recognizing the work of our reading coaches, the effort of the second and third graders in the program as they strive to become great readers, and all of the SPS staff here at the headquarters and in our partner schools and the Team Read nonprofits staff who make this program a reality.

It is truly a team effort.

And a special thanks also goes to Kathleen Vasquez, the K-12 Reading Program and Social Studies, Program manager and her amazing team for their innovative curriculum development and training support, which also is critical to making the program a success.

So I'm going to take you really on a lightning quick trip back to 1997, which is when Joan Doerr, who was the district's reading program manager at the time, began working with a team of her colleagues to develop the team read model.

Pat Sander was part of the team as was Louise McKinney, Charlotte Carr and many other district staff members.

Quite remarkably 18 years later the core elements of the model that they developed are essentially unchanged and I really believe that that is due in large part to the soundness of the program design and the research principles and beliefs on which it was based.

A solid public private partnership.

A belief in the capacity of teens to be effective inspiring role models, tutors and mentors.

The importance of ensuring alignment between classroom instruction and the work of tutors in the tutoring sessions.

A commitment about providing thorough training and supervision of the reading coaches and a recognition that tangible benefits to the reading coaches, hourly pay, service learning hours and tuition promotes in turn their commitment to their work as reading coaches.

What the planning group in 1997 couldn't have imagined is that there would be so many unplanned residual benefits for our community as a result of Team Read.

And I believe that one of those most important residual benefits is that our team reading coaches are shaped by their experience and it inspires them to continue to serve their communities.

So it's now with great pleasure that I introduce you to Kirsa Sanders who is a former Franklin alum and Team Read reading coach and she is now a member of the Team Read nonprofit board of directors.

She always inspires me.

Thanks so much, Maureen.

So as Maureen said, I'm a Franklin grad, so hooray to all the Quakers in the room.

And I was a reading coach 11 years ago.

So being a freshman at Franklin High School, there's some things I remember more vividly than other things, but I distinctly remember how I felt And the impact that Team Read had on me.

So 15-year-old me was frustrated.

I was disappointed because I had been looking for a job and no one was willing to give me a job.

I was too young.

I was inexperienced and I didn't have what it takes.

So luckily one of my friends told me about Team Read and she told me it was a program where I could combine one of my favorite pastimes, which is reading, with being able to make a positive impact on my community while also getting a paycheck.

And I was like, well, of course I'll sign up for Team Read.

So I signed up for Team Read and I was a tutor at Dearborn Park and at Brighton Elementary School.

And the 15-year-old me was most interested in getting a paycheck, right?

That was big to me, being able to go buy my own things.

But it wasn't really the paycheck that stuck with me.

It was actually all those other things that I learned through Team Read that are still with me today.

And the first is work ethic.

Talking a little bit about work ethic, all of my friends when I was 15 would stay outside of school after school.

You'd go to the store, you hung out.

I knew I had to be at Team Read for my reader.

So I would get on the 7 bus and go make sure I was at my elementary school Monday through Thursday after school and Friday was my day to hang out after school.

So I learned a lot of valuable lessons about work ethic.

And the second is mentorship.

When I first joined Team Read I thought I was just going to go there and work with the students on their reading but it was actually a lot more than that.

I realized the second and third graders were looking up to me.

They were looking to me to model how they should interact with people.

What is it like to be a high schooler?

What is it like to be a teenager?

How should I act?

And because I saw them looking at me for that, I started changing the way I behaved so I could set a good example for them.

So I learned quite a bit about mentorship.

And those are things that have stuck with me even after I left Team Reed.

From the time I was 15, I had a job.

I worked through community college.

I went to Seattle Central Community College.

I worked through the University of Washington.

I graduated top of my class at Foster School of Business.

And I now work for Deloitte Consulting in the Strategy and Operations Group.

So it's amazing to be able to bring it full circle and be on the board of Team Reed and I'm super passionate about what we do and what we do for our tutors and the students but most importantly the lessons that you get out of it that aren't surface level, right?

All those residual effects, they're real and I've experienced it and 16,000 alum in the city of Seattle have experienced it and I hope more people get the opportunity.

So I couldn't resist the opportunity today.

We're in recruitment mode.

So I actually brought down a large stack of Team Read reading coach applications.

You're all welcome to share them with any teenagers that you know who you think might be interested in working for Team Read.

So Anya has those.

And again, thank you so much.

I would like to invite all the directors and Dr. Nyland to please take a photo with the Team Reed group.

And also for this evening, for our student presentation, I would like to welcome the Eckstein Senior Jazz Band led by the Director of Bands, Mr. Mo Escobedo.

Eckstein Middle School has a robust music program.

More than half of the students at Eckstein participate in an ensemble, which include concert band, jazz band, orchestra, choir, vocal jazz, jazz combo, And Chamber Orchestra, Eckstein Middle School feeds into nationally recognized music departments at Roosevelt and Nathan Hill.

Thank you so much for being here with us.

And after the photo, I would like the directors to please sit in your seats so we're going to be able to hear the band.

Thank you.

¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ Well, I met him on the corner.

It was full of rain.

Yes, I met him on the corner.

It was full of rain.

He said, come on in here, baby, and tell me why.

Avoid using all capitals.

Come on, boys.

...

...

I hear the telephone.

I hear the telephone.

Waitin' for ya, baby, cause I feel so old, you know.

Seedles is my name.

Seedles is my name.

It was Brooke on vocals.

On tenor, it was George.

And you also heard from Javier on the trumpet.

We have one more piece for you.

That last piece was called Deedles by Frank Foster.

The next piece is called The Chicken.

And it's going to start out...

Let's see with the whole band kind of a little bit of a soul gospel thing going on in front and then the bass player will continue it just like Jaco Pastorius.

This is going to be an uh on the bass, uh George on the tenor, on flute we're going to hear from Brooke and we have a little combo ensemble in the middle.

This is called the chicken.

3, 1, 2. .

¶¶

Come on.

Come on.

¶¶

Isn't this amazing?

Thank you so much.

That was really amazing.

It's actually going to motivate us to really get our meeting going.

But before we do that I wanted everyone to actually say your name and what grade?

Nathan 8th grade.

Jacob 8th grade.

Faye 8th grade.

Yuji 8th grade.

Eli 8th grade.

Abby, eighth grade.

Cole, eighth grade.

George, eighth grade.

Brooke, eighth grade.

Sydney, eighth grade.

Abby, seventh grade.

Anna, eighth grade.

Damias, eighth grade.

Julia, eighth grade.

Mathob, eighth grade.

Roberto, eighth grade.

Liam, seventh grade.

Ben, eighth grade.

Tim, eighth grade.

Mary, 8th grade.

Anna, 8th grade.

Daniel, 7th grade.

Amina, 7th grade.

Nick, 8th grade.

Thatcher, 8th grade.

Toma, 8th grade.

Anna, 8th grade.

Kyra, 7th grade.

Sylvie, 8th grade.

Rachel, 8th grade.

Tim 8th grade.

Hans 7th grade.

Javier 7th grade.

Solomon 8th grade.

Isabella 8th grade.

Audrey 7th grade.

Emma 8th grade.

Dylan 8th grade.

Ailey 8th grade.

Theo 7th grade.

Nicholas 8th grade.

Grace, seventh grade.

Thank you so much and I also want to thank you director for doing a wonderful job and you guys are so talented.

Thank you, really appreciate that.

Thank you.

I just want to say you guys are brilliantly talented beyond your years.

Thank you.

Okay.

All right.

That's awesome, you guys.

They're so fond of it.

Yeah, they were very strong.

Oh, yeah.

I clearly missed an opportunity to get my kids.

Oh, really?

It's time to stop.

Oh, jeez.

Oh, jeez.

Oh, jeez.

Because ain't no party like a board meeting party, things don't break in the middle of it.

So, for public testimony, the timer on the podium isn't working.

Oh, okay.

And this is working at her seat, so she has it.

So I have a little statement for you to make.

Okay.

That basically she's got a track at her seat.

She's got a chimer on her phone.

She's got that great technology.

And so she'll make a chime over at 30 seconds.

Okay.

And then another one when the person's two minutes are concluded.

Okay.

And then you just kind of have to...

Monitor it.

...since.

It's been about 15 seconds.

All right.

It's been about 20 seconds.

I'll do it on my phone.

Okay.

Thank you.

Mm-hmm.

So, Teresa.

Teresa.

Did you want to edit?

Yeah, I just want to edit something.

If I create a new copy, is it something small enough to keep them noted?

Right now?

No.

No?

Okay.

I'm just trying to figure out how to make sure I get what you're going to...

Okay, so there's two edits to the same set of edits?

Yeah.

Okay, I will have my pen ready.

Thank you for the hesitation.

So there's two separate items.

We're not going to make the changes now.

So basically you're pulling it off the agenda period and bringing it back on September 21st.

So then there's the two for the superintendent to take off the agenda that we've already noted, and then yours is the third to amend.

So when we're amending the agenda, that's when you need to make the request to amend to remove those minutes.

Don't we just move the table then until the next meeting, though?

Because we're in the meeting, what we are routine is to amend the agenda so that the items come off.

I can check with Noel, but that's been our practice.

And since we have the other two items, we're already amending the agenda.

Well, Rick is pulling something off of consent to discuss and vote tonight.

Correct?

So it's a little different.

They're wanting to vote on it.

And Rick decided to discuss and vote at the time of consent.

Alright thank you to Eckstein they were here at 2 o'clock this afternoon and it looks like obviously they have got a lot of practice in under their belts in previous years even if not over the summer so thank you to Eckstein.

Well Several recognitions.

I'll start with a White House recognition.

Congratulations to Deborah Ruth Halperin, teacher at Thurgood Marshall.

She is selected to receive a presidential award for excellence in mathematics and science teaching.

She will receive a citation signed by President Obama and a $10,000 award from the National Science Foundation.

We will be inviting her back at a future meeting to recognize her before the board but I wanted to certainly thank her for her outstanding work on behalf of our students.

And as we all know today was the first day of school so we had lots of thousands and thousands of students and thousands of staff members show up and what an awesome beginning to the school year.

Many of the board of directors participated in the five ribbon cuttings that we have held in the last few days for five new schools that will cut into our maintenance backlog.

And provide some additional seating for our students.

In addition, the facilities department has created 90 new classrooms, kind of out of whole cloth, portables and partitions in overly large classrooms and taking over libraries and a variety of other ways to get the added classrooms that we need for enrollment growth and for the smaller class sizes at our elementary levels.

That is just a huge workload for everybody.

So for those 250 staff members who had to box everything up and move it and then there must be, I don't know, 12, 15 departments that have a role in getting those materials moved.

So the desks, the chairs, the computers, Boxes of teachers stuff, all of those things need to be moved and it's kind of helpful if they go to the right place at the right time.

So I know that as we were doing the ribbon cuttings there were still workers in the building doing the last minute touches on the building and at the same time there were teachers in the building waiting patiently or maybe not too patiently for the opportunity to get into their classrooms and actually begin to set up their classrooms.

Thank you to literally hundreds and thousands of employees who have had a hand in getting off to a positive start.

As you've heard me say before as an old history teacher I enjoy kind of thinking about what are the big messages.

We as districts tend to keep track of when we open new buildings, when we close buildings.

We don't often remember kind of what was the subtext.

So a couple of big ideas for this school year.

Our kindergarten students began this year for the first time in history under all day kindergarten for each and every kindergarten student everywhere in the district.

So thank you to the legislature for funding that.

Second, we started with our new bell times having high school students come to school about an hour or so later than they have in the past so that they get a little bit more rest and come to school more alert and ready to learn.

That's been on the several national news platforms, USA Today and a variety of others have reported that story nationally.

I've already mentioned the five new schools and about 3,000 students that will go to school in bright, shiny classrooms.

And I've mentioned the 90 new classrooms that we have to have for growth in smaller class size.

The other kind of headline message for our school year is that thanks to our school board we have been holding tightly to three big call them smart goals for the work of the district around improving student learning, closing opportunity gaps and improving customer service.

And so because of that ongoing focus from the board that allows us to coordinate our work as a district and so for the first time in many years, somebody would know how long, we did a district wide tri-day with regard to a theme and the theme was around relationships and so the board will be having a retreat on Saturday and we'll be talking about The smart goals that the board will be putting in place for this coming year and talking about how we make that happen.

And we'll be sharing with the board that the district continues to do incredible work for students overall.

A strong positive trend line for academic achievement on the smarter balance that trend continues for this year just ended.

And we still have a far too large Opportunity gap that we're working hard to close.

So one of our theories of action is that we're doing a great job on the academics part portion of it.

Great teaching, great leadership that I see in schools.

But we're working on the relationship part.

How do we double down on relationships and making sure that every student in the district particularly some of those students that we haven't historically served well Have a positive caring adult that's there to advocate for them.

So kudos to the district staff led by Pat Sander, to SEA, to PASS and all of our partners on pulling together The tri-day for 3,500 employees across the district.

So that was a great launch and as I visited schools today I saw that theme of positive relationships and resiliency played out in many places.

At Sandpoint this morning The PTA had a grab and go breakfast for the kids and then the parents were invited into the gym where they did a meet and greet and did some people bingo and built the relationships and asked for volunteers to sign up to help with PTA.

At Franklin, wow, blown away.

The administrative staff and the teachers were dressed in Franklin t-shirts.

It says B Franklin on here and I think I can still almost do it.

And then the words that are buried in there are F for focused and R for respectful, A for accountable and so forth.

So the staff all had those.

Team leaders had a turquoise shirt.

They pumped up the kids in terms of this is the first day for the rest of your life.

You can do this.

You're all going to college.

You're the class of 2020. You've got great vision.

We want you to be college and career ready.

And then they all left with a t-shirt that said class of 2020 and the B.

Franklin piece on it.

Incredible way to take the message and actually build those relationships with students.

West Seattle Elementary had a huge community gathering, a Be There rally where they had many community members and many African American dads on campus present waiting to greet students and letting them know that they were with them as they came to school today.

Washington Middle School was working with their students on building trust and teaching some learning success behaviors in pursuit of their mission, similar to Franklin's, theirs is best, be your best selves for brave, empathetic, safe and tenacious.

At interagency they had a marked increase in the number of students enrolling to recommit to school.

Twelve campuses across the district developed so that we provide positive alternatives for kids that maybe haven't found their niche in any of our other high school And at Arbor Heights, the mayor was there with Director Harris and several others of our staff to look at preschool and recognize the continued work of the city funded preschool throughout the district.

At Nova High School building relationships is huge.

Actually I have gotten several emails in the last few days asking from students outside of our district if they couldn't please have an exception to our enrollment process and enroll at Nova.

And then finally at Aki Kurose Middle School Mia Williams shared her focus and commitment to ABC3 attendance, behavior, course work, connections and currency.

So it's going to be an awesome year, we're off to a great start and as always just really appreciate the opportunity to be in schools, not in classrooms so much today but in schools seeing the positive start that principals and teachers and our educators are launching for us.

So one of our three goals that we continue to work on is eliminating the opportunity gap and trying to work with our teachers and with our schools to find those things that make a difference in closing opportunity gaps for us.

We know that that's a huge issue for us as a district and across the nation.

And so I have several reports to give in terms of some of that work that's underway by us and by some of our partners throughout the community that I'll begin tonight by introducing Principal Ted Howard from Garfield who has worked with the staff and has some Awesome opportunities for ninth graders in terms of taking away some of those barriers and opening up opportunities for students.

So Principal Ted Howard.

Good afternoon Dr. Nyland and board members.

First I want to say thank you Dr. Nyland for the superintendent commemoration you did for Joseph Bland.

He was a long time member of the Garfield faculty and he passed away with stomach cancer less than a month and he had been working for the district for over 30 years so thank you for acknowledgement of him.

As we jump into this year Garfield is undertaking a huge lift really it's not just a ninth grade lift but it's a whole staff lift and that lift is really Bringing our community together.

I know you guys have heard Garfield being two schools or three schools in one.

We're trying to eliminate that and it just doesn't start with us saying something or wearing a shirt.

It really starts with our behaviors and so one of the things that we're doing really hard is doing what we do best which is to address that in the classroom.

Our teachers who are going to come up now I'm going to talk about some of the things that they're undertaking and as they come forward some of the things that we have to do when we start saying we want to build a community and relationships with our students is really take a look at some of the things that we've done in the past that hasn't brought us together as a community.

One of those things is communication.

We had a ninth grade orientation at the beginning of this year and we decided not to go forward and have it right away because the rest of the ninth grade parent and community groups weren't notified.

They weren't notified in their language.

We didn't reach out to them in a systematic way to invite them and they didn't feel invited.

A lot of times when we have ethnic groups feel disenfranchised we have to find a way to really reconnect with them and that's what we're doing not only with the students but we're doing that with our parents and we're doing that with our community so they start to understand what the sense of building community is all about.

So without further ado I'm going to announce the stars here which are our teachers and they're going to talk a little bit about what Garfo is undertaking this year.

I'm a little shorter than Mr. Howard.

Hi, my name is Kit McCormick.

I teach ninth grade and twelfth grade English at Garfield.

I want to introduce the rest of the people that are here because they're not all talking.

You'll be happy to know.

They are here, Kelly Lasek for Andrea Sirocco who teaches English.

She couldn't be here because she's just at the beginning of childcare problems.

We have Corey Martin, history.

Alan Kahn, English.

Jeremy Lugo, history.

Mary Powers, English.

Rosa, sorry.

Adam Gish, English.

Tim Zimmerman, a new English teacher at Garfield.

Sorry, Kirsten Otterby, English.

Nathan Simeno, history.

Jerry Neufeldkaiser, history.

The kids just call him NK and Nathan King history.

So we're all here tonight because we're committed to this plan and I want to just give you an overview of what we're going to tell you tonight.

And then we'll give you a hard copy of it, okay?

So the overview kind of covers a summary of why we're doing this and then we'll talk a little bit about implementation, both the curriculum and the support needed to implement that curriculum and finally some data that I think solidly supports what we're doing.

The summary of the plan, Garfield serves a wide variety of learners.

Often the assumption is that the honors courses are populated with students who are all at the same level.

But in reality there is a wide range of learning needs in honors classes including ELL and special education students.

Consequently an honors class demands as much differentiation as any other.

In the same vein, many regular classrooms serve a wide range of learners.

Some students opt for these classes because they don't believe they can meet the challenge or because they've never had the opportunity to excel.

There is very little upward movement to honors classes from the general ed track.

We've seen that.

However, we see general ed students on a daily basis and know they are capable of meeting high expectations.

In addition, this split between regular ed and honors results In de facto racial segregation in our classrooms something you were referring to just earlier Dr. Nyland and in this system all of our students miss out on the value of engaging with diverse perspectives.

With support from the Garfield staff and administration we've developed an integrated all honors ninth grade humanities curriculum to provide opportunities to provide a better education for all our students.

And Mr. Kahn will talk to you about curriculum.

Delighted to be here on the first day of school after meeting 150 kids.

It's nice to meet the people who are at the top of this pyramid.

This is how we implement.

We are preparing all students for classes in 10th, 11th, 12th grade.

The curriculum is not watered down.

The curriculum will focus on developing safe and highly engaging collaborative classroom climate, one that fosters critical thinking and academic growth.

We will deepen and increase the rigor of the curriculum, challenging students to develop, practice and master a wide variety of skills.

We will be very deliberate about providing multiple access points to the curriculum such as not limited to scaffolding readings, finding ways to engage reluctant learners, providing student choice when appropriate, implementing project based learning and asking students to develop a wide range of products to show their learning.

With regards to implementation support, we have secured the assistance of Dr. Sheila Valencia, a literacy specialist and researcher at the University of Washington School of Education to consult with us on differentiation and to help us develop reading support strategies.

Teachers attended a three-day training on a technique called complex instruction which helps teachers develop meaningful group activities that are focused on constructivist theories of learning.

We will continue to research best practices In developing meaningful curriculum for all learners and will contact other experts to assist us as the need arises.

Our administration is committed to supporting collaboration among teachers on the team so that we can make this change beneficial for all learners.

Hello Rosa Powers, Scarfield High School 9th and 10th grade.

I am here to talk about data.

Our main goal is to create a richer honors curriculum that engages and benefits all ability levels.

Studies over the past 30 years that note the detrimental effects of ability level tracking are an indicator of the institutionalized racism that plagues our schools and adds to the opportunity gap.

A recent study found that Seattle Public Schools has the fifth widest achievement gap in all major school districts and you know this.

You know it all too well.

This is unacceptable especially when research supports that creating heterogeneous classrooms is beneficial for all students.

One study out of the Teachers College Columbia reports that researchers have documented that students' exposure to other students who are different from themselves and the novel ideas and challenges that such exposure brings leads to improved cognitive skills.

Including critical thinking and problem solving.

Similarly, Beth Rubin's article, Tracking and Detracking states a number of recent studies have found positive results for detracking and the heterogeneous grouping that it creates.

Thank you very much.

We know we threw that at you pretty fast.

We've had a lot of questions from parents, from other staff, some from you or people at the district and so I've included in here a handout frequently asked questions and so let me just give that to and let us know.

Please come see us, come see it in action.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Appreciate the time and effort and thought that's gone into that and thanks for coming tonight.

Other items underway with regard to relating to the elimination of the opportunity gap, I mentioned that the school board will be meeting here in the auditorium on the 10th, that's this Saturday, looking at all of the, well not all of the smart goals but many of the smart goals including budget and program and then looking at the elimination of the opportunity gap and how we work together to close that.

The mayor's educational summit is continuing to do their work and continuing to move forward.

The next meeting is on Monday the 12th and I'm guessing the 26th following that with the goal of making recommendations to the mayor by the end of September.

The four themes that they're zeroing in on are improving access to high quality learning opportunities and programs.

More time, more opportunity.

Second, creating positive, supportive and high quality teaching and learning environments, some of the positive relationship things that we've been talking about tonight.

Third, providing authentic family and community support and engagement around things like translations, health and safety and family support.

And then fourth, strengthening post-secondary access and attainment.

The goal that the summit has set is, and I don't have it in front of me so I can't quote it verbatim, but it follows through on this idea of having all students college and career ready.

So ready when they graduate to take advantage of post-secondary opportunities whether that might be Or whether that might be a community college or whether that might be a four-year university.

Recognizing that some large percentage, I've heard different numbers, 70-75% of new jobs today require some college, one year of college, not a four-year degree.

in order to have a solid family wage income to support yourself and your family.

So again, continue to support or appreciate the support from the mayor's office with regard to the work on the summit.

The African American Male Advisory Committee had their second meeting not long ago and they are forming themselves into subcommittees.

Seem to be a lot of interest in addressing some of the district policies that maybe stand in the way of those opportunities that we want to open up to all of our students.

I mentioned the Tri-Day and the work that has been done on that professional development day just before the school year started.

Seattle Housing Authority is partnering with Seattle Public Schools on an attendance theme.

I want to say I am pretty sure I got the right number that well I know that we have 6,000 students in Seattle Public Schools that are part of Seattle Housing and Those students 42 percent of them do not attend school 90 percent of the time.

So that's one of our national benchmarks that if you miss significant chunks of time you have holes in your learning and you have more difficulty keeping up and you fall behind and it becomes a vicious cycle.

I think district wide we're at 15% of our students that do not attend at least 90% of the time.

And so the Seattle Housing Authority has partnered with us on an attendance campaign and we have joint letters going out from the school district and from the Seattle Housing Authority to the students that are part of the Seattle Housing Authority talking about why attendance is important and why it matters a lot to be in school 100% of the time during the month of September particularly and particularly probably for our ninth graders as that's when they find out what the expectations are for class, they may get zero grades for not turning in assignments, they fall behind and then it's harder for them to catch up.

And then one that is coming forward to the board soon is that the Nashholm Foundation, which has been very instrumental in our three middle schools outperforming statewide.

They've funded our middle schools for the last 15 years or more.

They're out there on the stump talking to their friends and neighbors about why this work is so important and so we'll be having a bar coming before the board at the next meeting with regard to having the Satterberg Foundation step up and provide some of those similar services for some of the elementary schools that feed into those middle schools.

So a great example of great work that's happened in the district over many, many years and the way that it's spreading.

Critical issues going forward.

We've had one heavy lift.

We've done the bus routing somewhere later in my report here.

I think we, I'll wait until I get to it.

But we did quite well at the transportation for the new bell times given the fact that they were all new and it meant a lot of changes for a lot of students across the district.

Several other issues that are coming to the fore, we agreed in bargaining a year ago to add 20 minutes to the school day starting not this year but next year, a year from now.

So we're in the process of having those discussions with SEA as part of our bargaining process but kind of parallel and maybe just before the bargaining process is the community engagement process in terms of where that 20 minutes goes.

Does it go before the start of our current school day?

Does it go at the end or is it split some on the front and some on the back end of that?

And I think that those will certainly involve teachers in that conversation but that's somewhat more of a community piece than the teacher piece which is the internal how do we spend that 20 minutes inside of the school day.

So that will be coming back to you hopefully by November 2nd so that it can go into the transportation bid specs that we need to put out for transportation for a year from now.

Similarly, part of that discussion with SEA was going to a more consistent early release late start schedule so that families could plan better and that schools could plan better for consistent professional development time.

On a weekly basis so that issue as well will be going before families to talk about which makes better sense.

I think both of those issues will be somewhat challenging for us in that everybody's situation is a bit unique and there probably isn't any one plan that will be universally overwhelmingly popular.

And then thirdly, the board did look at boundaries many years ago and we have two middle schools opening a year from now that will require some changes in boundaries.

However, we're suspecting that many of the people who came to those boundary committee meetings two years ago weren't necessarily thinking about where their middle school students might go A year from now.

So we will be going out with some community meetings partly just to revet those boundary decisions and letting people know that oh by the way the board did approve boundaries and the boundaries will be changing for 2017. And in some cases we do have new data.

That show that those boundaries won't work as exactly as anticipated two years ago.

One example of that is Cascadia that there will be moving from Lincoln into a new school designed for 660 students and they currently have 770 students.

So, we need a plan B for how we will accommodate 770 students plus whatever the growth is one year forward from now.

So we'll be doing a lot of community engagement, trying out our community engagement tool and figuring out how we get input and community engagement and bring some recommendations back to the board in a timely way so that we can move forward with the transportation contract for 17-18.

So it sounds odd, the ink's not even dry on day one and we're talking about what happens to get ready for one year from now.

Staffing, as you know one of our goals this year was early hiring and we had a goal I think it was of 215 early hires and we exceeded that by quite a bit and as of the last day of school I believe that we were fully hired for special education, nurses and a couple of other categories.

Well that was then and this is now.

We had staff members who left over the course of the summer and so we had positions to be filled.

HR is working diligently on that.

And then we have increasingly I think I can choose my word a little bit better.

Difficult certification challenges for our incoming teachers.

So we have several categories of teachers that we are hiring and bringing into our system.

Some of them I suppose are brand new and some of them at one of the milestones where they have to re-up their certificate work and so we've been working with OSPI in some cases they've given extra grace time for teachers to meet those requirements and in other cases we've had to ask those teachers to sit out for a few days or weeks until they can get their certification requirements met with the state.

So we're working hard on getting all of that done.

I haven't gotten the update but today had a lot of pre-advertising in the Seattle Times with regard to McCleary.

So today was the date that the Supreme Court asked to hear back from both the state of Washington about why they had or had not met the McCleary guidelines and to hear from the news plaintiffs, one of which is us, about whether the state had or had not met those standards.

The state Supreme Court basically had before the legislature three additional things, continued work on class size, raising state spending to the level that the legislature themselves set a number of years ago, I think it was 2008, 2009, and figure out how to pay for the cost of teacher salaries.

The questions before the court today was trying to find out from both parties what they think remains to be done.

There was disagreement on that.

Second, how much it was expected to cost.

There's disagreement on that.

And how the state intends to fund it.

And I think that's been one of the bigger challenges for the state to figure out how they were going to fund it moving forward.

The legislature has promised now in four different parts of state law adopted in the last legislative session that they will have a solution for McCleary by April 1st of 2017. A plan for a plan.

Some have called what they have so far.

So we'll see what the Supreme Court does in the next few days.

There's no requirement for the Supreme Court.

They may act relatively swiftly.

This certainly isn't the first time that they have heard this set of arguments now.

Or it may take two or three months for them going forward.

And again, the Seattle Times has done a great job of reporting on it.

And I think one of theirs was kind of their last resort was don't open school until in the fall in 2017. Until there's a solution and they pointed out that in New Jersey the legislature was able to kind of like during our strike I guess was able to come up with a solution within eight days of the start of the school year in New Jersey.

So more to come on McCleary as we go forward.

Several community engagement opportunities have been underway.

We continue to work in partnership with SEA on the partnership committee.

Several pieces of work that we've done together.

One is a joint assessment calendar.

Second, we've been continuing to work on PAR, Peer Assistance Review Process and we'll have a team of administrative staff, teaching staff in Montgomery County in a few days learning more about what that could look like.

And then we've continued to partner with regard to the race and equity teams from 10 additional schools.

The International Education Task Force submitted a report recently which I found very helpful and very informative.

I know that there's been many promises made over the years in Seattle and in this case I was finally able to see, oh okay, it's written down in one spot, that's what we have at one point in time committed to do.

We currently have 10 international schools.

The build out is intended to be a series of four schools in each of our five pathways which would make a total of 20 schools and we have 10 that are partially built out.

So Dearborn Park for example, I forget which grade they're in.

It's either second grade or I think it was second grade moving to third grade.

Where they have dual language teachers in kindergarten for a second and then they need a dual language teacher for grade three as the students roll up.

So we're not quite fully built out for 10 schools and the expectation was that we would create that for a total of 20 schools.

When we talk about mitigation, those, I don't know about 10 schools, but at least the elementary schools in that group are ones that had to have mitigation in order to have a schedule that would work for them this fall.

So it's costing us an extra teacher for each one of those so far 10 schools and we do something similar for Montessori schools, small K8 schools and some of our other schools so you'll hear more about that on Saturday.

In any way the International Education Task Force recommended completing one of the pathways with a high school, completing a second one with an elementary school and that would if we were able to do that complete three of the five pathways.

Highly capable, I mentioned that we'll be moving forward with community conversations about how to handle the overflow of students that are currently at Lincoln and too big to move into the Cascadia building that will be opening one year from now.

And on September 18th at 6 p.m.

Director Harris and Kerry Campbell will be hosting the second community engagement task force.

Right, that's a public meeting for the committee as well as for anybody else that would like to attend.

So nearing the end, I'm really long winded today for only four or five pages.

We tried to get out a lot of information with regard to bell times.

We're certainly glad to have school messenger back.

Here's the transportation piece, 98% on time arrival this morning for our buses.

Thank you for that work.

Mentioned a lot about the new schools.

City of Seattle partnerships.

We've been working for some time on a new MOU with regard to joint use of Seattle Parks and Seattle Public Schools facilities, fields and gyms.

Due to bell times that all needed to be renegotiated so Dr. Herndon has been having many many sessions with Seattle Parks and Rec and trying to figure out how to change expectations for all of those community groups as well as for all of our uses of facilities.

So that's underway.

We're doing a two month bridge of a letter of agreement in order to get all the details.

Bring them to the board for formal board approval.

One of those areas that we found that it's been many, many years since we brought that forward for board approval so we will be bringing that forward.

Likewise, Schmitz Park, it took a long time and it got right down to the wire here but we're able to finesse kind of what was the maximum or the minimum, I'm not sure how to say that, We want to follow our policies and try to make it as affordable as possible for the daycare facility that would be using the Schmitz Park building and at the same time honor our board policy.

That was a little bit more than Parks and Rec was able to see their way clear to fund.

I think FLIP's negotiating strategy skills was that, you know, there's a fixed cost on our side so if you recruit more students, your cost, you'll have more students to cover your costs.

So I don't know if that's how they closed the gap but they were able to close the gap.

And then we have a meeting coming up with the City of Seattle with regard to the Seattle Center.

City of Seattle is trying to get all of the different players from Seattle Center together, talk about what their hopes and dreams are for that property and see what's possible in terms of coordinating those plans.

Director Patu and Director Peters have been invited to participate in that discussion.

Do have some really good work that's been underway with our community partners working together on professional development.

That's been an exciting story over the last several, over the last year really to work with our community partners to find out what it is that they want to know and what they would like us to know about their needs and so appreciate the work that's gone into that as we try to partner.

And I would say that the Wallace Foundation grant caused us to do some really deep thinking around that in terms of how we could coordinate our work and I don't know where it will go with the summit but that's also been a theme, a sub-theme in the summit conversations with the city is it's great that the city is going to do some work and the school district is going to do some work and we want to I don't know, we do want to coordinate it but there's two ways to coordinate.

One is you do this and I'll do that and the other one is we will actually do some work together maybe with our CBOs, our community based partners.

to actually build on that work.

So for example, Team Reed tonight, we asked them at our last board meeting if they thought about math and they said, well, thanks, but we want to stick with our mission and do it really, really well.

That would be a great example if there was somebody who was willing to come forth and do something around math and create some kind of a linkage and a partnership and an alignment so that we learn from everything that they're doing.

I suppose the Nashholm to Satterberg is another one of those so if we could start to have more true coordination where we really are aligned that would be awesome.

Staffing changes.

I'd like to introduce Dr. Kyle Konoshita joining as the Chief of Curriculum and Instruction.

Welcome, Kyle.

Kyle was here on September 1st and that was the day that we had our training district-wide for our staff for our Tri-Day and we had it at original Van Aselt for the CNI staff And so Kyle was there as his first day on the job and he had his opportunity to introduce himself and welcome the CNI staff, many of whom hadn't met him yet.

And he was able to do that by saying that he had spent five years in that very cafeteria as a student.

So welcome, Kyle.

Kyle comes to us with nine years of experience in the role in Marysville.

And then the director of technology interviews are underway.

We had 57 applicants.

10 were interviewed in the first round.

Next round of interviews take place next week.

Many of those applicants were from out of district, out of state.

And talked about wanting to come work for us because of the work that we're doing to eliminate opportunity gaps in our commitment to excellence for all of our students.

So moving on to the agenda.

Sorry for my long-winded remarks here.

It is the first day of school.

It's exciting.

Two requests for agenda items.

First, we'd like to postpone the consent agenda item number six, the resolution on racial imbalance for Magnolia Elementary.

Some of the comments in the board meeting at the last board meeting prompted a review of that and we'd like to take a little bit longer to look at that and bring it back at the next meeting.

Actually I guess it says November 16th, pardon me.

Second, I would like to request a postponement of action item number one, the resolution to memorialize the support for Duwamish nation, asking to move that to the October 12th board meeting.

This also came out of the discussion that we had at the last meeting and the desire to check with some of the neighboring tribes before carrying that item forward.

I don't know if Director Pinkham has anything he wants to add to that or not.

Thank you.

Director superintendent excuse me and I only did email me ask if I would be up to postponing this resolution which I agree because I do want to bring in other tribal leaders around the area to let them know what we are proceeding with and not to blindside them with oh this is a resolution that the school district proposed but I also wanted to Let others know that this isn't anything new.

There are other organizations that have submitted support for the federal recognition of the Duwamish tribe.

Quick list here includes the Washington State Democratic Central Committee, represent Jim McDermott, Tappert School, K-5 actually wrote something, Southwest Seattle Historical Society, the Seattle Human Rights Commission and the University of Washington American Student Commission.

We wouldn't be alone in this but I hope that we will be again community engagement and let others know what we are proceeding to do and I do look forward to continuing conversations with the tribal leaders.

Thank you that concludes my remarks.

Thank you Superintendent Nyland.

As we have now reached the action portion of the agenda we will address the superintendent's request to amend the agenda to postpone action on consent item number 6 PTA 4 resolution 1216 Slash 17-4, racial imbalance analysis for Magnolia Elementary School renovation and addition project in action item number one, resolution 2016 slash 17-1, memorize support of federal recognition of the Duwamish nation.

I also have been informed that director Peters and Harris would like to postpone action on the August 24th board meeting minutes to provide edits to staff and bring them back to the next board meeting.

I will now entertain a motion to amend the agenda to postpone number one, consent item number six, PTA-4, resolution 2016 slash 17-4, ratio and balance analysis for Magnolia Elementary School renovation addition project to the November 16th agenda.

Number two, action item number one, resolution 2016 slash 17 dash one, memorize support of federal recognition of the Duwamish nation to the October 12th agenda.

And number three, the minutes of the August 24th board meeting to the September 21st agenda.

I motion to, I so move.

I second the motion.

Do directors have any questions or comments on this motion to amend the agenda?

I see none.

Miss Ritchie roll call please.

Director Harris.

Aye.

Director Peters.

Aye.

Director Pinkham.

Aye.

Director Blanford.

Aye.

Director Burke.

Aye.

Director Geary.

Aye.

Director Patu.

Aye.

Motion has passed unanimously.

We have now reached the consent portion of tonight's agenda.

May I have a motion for the consent agenda?

I move approval of the consent agenda as amended.

I second the motion as amended.

Approval of consent agenda has been moved and second.

Do directors have any items they would like to remove from the consent agenda?

Director Burke.

I would like to remove item number five.

Resolution 2016-17-3 Racial Imbalance Analysis for EC Hughes Elementary School Renovation Project.

I second.

I motion to approve the consent agenda as re-amended.

I second the motion.

All those in favor?

Aye.

All those opposed?

Aye.

We didn't have a discussion.

I don't know why it was removed.

I think we are about to have a discussion.

This is a motion to approve the consent agenda without item number five on it.

And I believe discussion of item number five might follow.

It passed so go ahead.

I just didn't hear any discussion of the item and I think actually that we can discuss it.

Yes and I think that's what the plan is at this point.

I think we were just doing the housekeeping part and now we go into the discussion.

I think as I tracked it you have now approved the consent agenda minus the item that Director Burke had removed and so now would be the time I think where Director Burke if he wanted to speak to why he removed that item have staff answer any questions then assuming that you still want to approve the removed item you would then need to make a motion to approve that item.

Okay.

Let's see.

Alright I move that the school board approve resolution 2016-17-3 certifying that the proposed EC Hughes Elementary School renovation project will not create or aggravate racial imbalance as defined by WAC 392-342-025 as attached to the board action report.

Second the motion.

So Director Burke you want to go ahead and

Yeah just to sort of address why I requested that this be removed.

This has come up in discussion a couple of times and so I appreciate staff's patience and transparency around this.

Just the words racial imbalance tend to have a certain charge associated with them.

It's like a little highlighter that goes on top of the resolutions although recognizing that this is something that we do fairly regularly with new buildings and since we had a rich discussion at operations where I was fortunate to be a guest and I've had a couple of discussions at board meetings but the Magnolia Racial imbalance has been removed from the agenda for further discussion and this one had not.

So what I was looking for from staff was to clarify what is the differential between the Magnolia racial imbalance discussion that we are looking for at a future date and the E.C.

Hughes one which we are looking for in this current motion and specifically I'm looking for any opportunity where we as a board or staff can try to mitigate racial imbalances and so I see this as a leverage point for these sort of discussions and for staff to be able to make recommendations on how we can as a district look for ways to improve our racial balance.

Richard Best, Director of Capital Projects and Planning for Seattle Public Schools.

Director Burke, we removed the Magnolia Elementary School racial imbalance so that we could go back and look at the boundaries that we would be proposing to the board for that school and for that project.

For EC Hughes we did not remove this Certification that's required for OSPI form D5 because we are utilizing the Rocks Hill boundary.

We are just relocating the Rocks Hill school from its existing location to EC Hughes and so that's why we are not requesting that this be removed from tonight's board agenda.

Madam Chair.

Director Harris.

Is Associate Superintendent Herndon in the house?

I recall attending the community meeting.

We were taking a good chunk of Sunrise Heights potentially from West Seattle or High Point Elementary and moving them This group of people in an essentially white middle class neighborhood to ECU's when Rox Hill moves north to ECU's.

Am I confused here?

That was a boundary that occurred for this coming school year.

So that boundary already exists.

Previously the area that you were talking about was an area that was, if I'm recalling correctly, was between Arbor Heights and Roxhill.

So when we looked at that particular boundary move, which was originally supposed to happen in 2013 and was not implemented, that was the conversation we had the previous year to be implemented for this year when Arbor Heights opened.

So that boundary shift has already happened.

I'd like some feedback at some point because my recollection pretty firmly was that that was the northern boundary was shifted south and my recollection was that the West Seattle high point elementary folks and the PTSA was shall we say very animated about the fact that we were changing the diversity in these schools.

So that could be.

But that particular boundary shift I think I recall the area that you're talking about.

So that particular there were two areas that were shifting for Roxhill and Arbor Heights.

There was one between Roxhill and Arbor Heights and then there was an area between West Seattle and Roxhill.

So that particular area again was shifting because of the capacity concerns at West Seattle Elementary.

They didn't have the available physical capacity within their building to continue to have those students which was why we were making one of the shifts that we had.

And again that one took place for this year.

Those were all boundary adjustments.

If we had the conversations previously they were a year ahead.

So those boundaries currently exist and are in place.

So they wouldn't be different.

Director Pinkham.

Yeah so I still have that program school issue kind of going on through my head here.

So officially Roxhill Elementary School is moving to E.C.

Hughes Elementary School and that's not considered a closure of Roxhill Elementary?

As far as I can recall it's not because we are not closing the school we are moving the school from one location to another.

So Roxhill Elementary basically is becoming EC Hughes.

Correct.

So it's renaming the school not moving the school into a new building and then renaming it.

Yeah we'll go through the naming process we have a whole separate process for naming schools and buildings and what we would do so we'll explore that one as well.

Okay and then some of the language in the bar still refers to it as a program every now and then so I need some clarification on that as well.

I thought we had cleaned most of that up.

It was still after I see that it is again the second page just right above the definition you do say that they have after the enrollment planning section of the capital project planning and then the last sentence in that one says the program will remain in neighborhood attendance area school.

Okay we'll take a look at that.

I am not seeing that in this particular.

Okay so again section 7 on the background information and then the paragraph right above the definitions that last sentence the program will remain a neighborhood attendance area school.

That's what I'm trying to find on this particular copy.

Definitions.

Okay yeah we see that.

Okay thank you.

Director Harris.

Do we have any update as to the future use of Roxhill Elementary physical school and I ask this because I believe it was the last two board meetings we've asked about Decatur and then we find out in the Friday memo that we're looking at Decatur as a possible site for HCC and I just I want the heads up.

Well currently we do not have a proposed use for Rocks Hill yet doesn't mean that it won't be used but it is one of the buildings that will be in discussion with the capacity management task force that's convening our next meeting is next Wednesday but there will be several other meetings over the next six or seven months and all of our buildings things like Rocks Hill And other buildings, Reginald Van Essel, those will all be considered as to what would be appropriate uses for those locations.

And you appreciate the hotbed of crime next door at Roxhill Park and the fact that at the Seattle Parks Department bathrooms is probably one of the best places to score heroin in this city.

We will certainly make sure that Roxhill, the building itself does not aggravate that particular situation for sure.

Thank you.

Any more comments, questions?

Board directors?

Ms. Ritchie roll call.

Director Peters?

Aye.

Director Pinkham.

Director Blanford.

Director Burke.

Director Geary.

Director Harris.

Director Patu.

Aye.

Motions passed 6-0-1.

Okay, we have now reached the 5.30 p.m.

when we will do our public testimony.

The rules for public testimony are on the screen and I would ask that speakers are respectful of these rules.

I would note that the board does not take public comments on issues related to personnel or individually named staff.

I would also like to note that each speaker has a two-minute speaking time.

When the two minutes have ended, please conclude your remarks.

And Miss Ritchie will read off the testimony speakers.

I would note that for this evening's meeting we are having technical issues with the timer on the podium.

So Miss Ritchie will track the time on her timer and you will hear a chime when you have 30 seconds remaining and then another chime when your two minutes have ended.

Thank you.

Chris Jackins, David Posner and Carol Simmons.

My name is Chris Jackins box 84063 Seattle 98124 on the resolution for school board support of federal recognition of the Duwamish nation.

Two points number one the superintendent has asked to delay this item until October.

Number two I do not support changes to the resolution that might water down support of federal recognition of the Duwamish nation.

On Loyal Heights, the playground would shrink by 30%, please fix this project.

On Magnolia and EC Hughes racial imbalance and on the Magnolia ed specs.

Two points, number one, current plans for Magnolia and EC Hughes will create racially imbalanced schools.

Please vote no.

Number two, the Magnolia ed specs also should be delayed.

On Schmitz Parks and Rocks Hill, four points.

Number one, please allow me to remind you of the state rules regarding the closure of school sites.

Number two, when Pathfinder at the Genesee Hill site was closed, the district held a school closure process for the Genesee Hill site, even though Pathfinder School was to remain open at the Cooper site.

Number three, this is the same as the current situation where the Schmitz Park site is being closed while the school is moving to Genesee Hill and where the Rocks Hill site is being closed while the school is moving to EC Hughes.

Number four, the district appears to be violating state law by closing Schmitz Park and Rocks Hill school sites because no school closure process has been held.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Well, hello again.

I'm going to have to figure out what I can do to, no matter how early I call on a Monday morning, Chris is always ahead of me.

I don't know how he does that.

I gave you a little break from coming here to talk about recess, but I'm back.

And it really struck me today.

I substituted in a fifth grade class of a South Central Title I school, excuse me, that this year added an additional recess.

So one in the morning, one at lunch and one in the afternoon.

And to be able to point to the clock and point to the schedule and tell those kiddos, it's coming, stay focused, stay with me, it's coming, made a world of difference for those kids.

You know there are still people in the scientific community who deny climate change.

Okay, they're a shrinking number and before long there will be none of them.

There are a shrinking number of people in the educational field who continue to deny the value and importance of recess.

And some of you, no offense, are on the podium and on the periphery.

It's almost like the American Academy of Pediatrics, they wrote a prescription that said recess for kids and it's crucial.

And I know we established a 30 minute minimum with the contract.

I want to take you back to May of 2015 when the district's own wellness committee submitted a recommendation for a recess policy that established a minimum of 220 minutes.

The consensus of that group was really we needed more, 45 was what we wanted but that we would never get 45 past the board.

Let's go with the 40. It never surfaced.

It's been buried.

The district needs a recess policy.

Not the contract but the district.

I wish that those Garfield teachers were here today still to recognize that this opportunity gap and achievement gap it doesn't start in high school.

It actually starts in preschool.

When kids are being excluded from play and recess and not even going to get into the disproportionality and equity piece of it.

It starts in preschool, starts in kindergarten, starts in elementary school.

High school is too late to be addressing it.

Please consider taking action on that policy recommendation which you have had since May of 2015. Thank you.

Good evening.

I urge you to reconsider your vote against moving Rox Hill to the ECU Hughes facility.

This relocation may not aggravate or create racial imbalance, but it will certainly perpetuate it.

Redraw or realign boundaries, prioritize transportation dollars, do whatever it takes, but no way should our school board perpetuate racial imbalance.

Also, approach the mayor and the city council and insist they develop policies and regulations that will result in eliminating economic segregation, which is tied to racial segregation and contributes to the opportunity gap.

Show them that you will do your job in desegregating the schools, but they must do theirs also.

Furthermore, you now have the opportunity to support the recommendations that were made by the Mayor's Educational Summit and are many of the same ones as those made by the first Disproportionality Task Force in 1978. One of these recommendations is the elimination of out of school suspension for all grade levels.

This may demonstrate to the charter school proponents that we will educate all of the children.

Resume the data profile document.

It protects student and staff privacy and demonstrates equity to all stakeholders by including those who are separated by the digital divide.

And finally, for heaven's sakes, don't postpone any longer the resolution to improve Indian education.

This is a long time overdue.

You currently have many opportunities to eliminate the opportunity gap by doing what is right and what you were expected and elected to do.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Richard Trough, Frank Swart, Patricia Bailey.

Hi, I'm Richard Truax.

I spoke to the board on this same topic almost four years ago, but I'm a 20-year resident of the Ingram community.

I have a daughter as a sophomore year.

I'm entering my 25th year teaching social studies in the state of Washington and my 15th at Garfield High School.

And my topic is about IBX at Ingram High School.

When I first learned about the HCC or at that time APP moving into Ingram, I was excited.

I thought it was a great fit.

And I thought that program would work well there.

About a year later after the program was in, I became aware of the concept of IVX and I was appalled.

When that program was created, nobody in creating that, Bob Vaughn, Guy Thomas, Martin Floh, or anybody in this district came over to Garfield to ask us about the struggles we've had with racial tension at Garfield since the beginning of that program.

That racial tension was manifested yesterday when one of our students posted a tweet showing a man in a Ku Klux Klan outfit and a woman in a burka and asking why he can't wear his robes and she can wear hers.

That was one of our HCC students.

That tension, we've had parents out about four years ago standing in front of our school waving APP apartheid signs.

That tension is there.

It's been there.

And yet at Garfield, we don't have a single class, a single program that is exclusive to APP or HCC kids.

They don't have a label, a blue ribbon.

They don't get to run around and say, we're APX.

They're just students at Garfield.

And we still have those tensions.

Ingram created this program.

The kids are, and I'll come to the performance side, the kids there are already struggling with it.

We had a backlash during the MLK assembly this year where white students felt threatened by the presentation by the Black Student Union.

And when you have white students feeling threatened by an MLK assembly, we have a problem.

Our data does not support this program.

The performance data of this community does not support segregated rooms for them.

It is a giant community with a large bell curve.

And I've worked with this group.

There's amazing students.

But that bell curve is large.

And so while we focus on the very top of it, there are students stretched without it.

We need to integrate them in.

And step one is listening to all the racial comments tonight is eliminating the concept of IBX.

Thank you.

Thank you.

You guys get the handout?

Hi, I'm Frank Swart and I hope you had a good vacation.

Glad to be back here.

You may be wondering why I'm lecturing you again this year.

It's because you didn't pass the class last year.

You're now in remedial Loyal Heights Elementary Education.

This presentation I'm just going to walk through a little handout I put together apparently on August 19th there was a proposal from the district staff to remove the two childcare rooms from Loyal Heights opening up some playground space and while we appreciate the gesture it didn't seem like they were very willing to do that and so they had a number of statements that I think were false and I just wanted to point by point counter them.

The first one is that we have a limited number of school sites and virtually no ability to add school sites.

That may be true for Seattle in general but in Ballard we know that there is the Webster site which is coming online in about four or five years and also recently sold was the Crown Hill Elementary.

I think that was in 2009 and to me that just is a reminder that you can overreact by getting rid of buildings and you can over, I think the yo-yo is going the other way, we're overreacting by building too much in Ballard right now.

Second statement in the box on the left there, our school enrollment population continues to grow by 10 to 30 classrooms per year.

That may be true, but not for the Ballard area.

There's a graph.

This is from the master plan, facilities plan, and you can see the flat line going from 2016-17 out to 2023. Flat enrollment for the Whitman service area, which is the collection of elementary schools going to Whitman.

Flip the page.

I know that's just 2023. We're building for 50 years and we have the Puget Sound Regional Council.

It's a little bit more difficult to read but on the right on the Ballard line you can see that by 2040 we expect 1% growth in the amount of public school employment in the Ballard area.

So this is measuring the number of teachers you need in public school in Ballard.

There's a couple more statements in the back.

It looks like I'm out of time.

Is that my minute and a half or is that the two minutes?

Yeah.

That's it?

Okay.

So you can read those yourself.

But thank you for your attention.

Welcome back.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Good evening.

I'm Patricia Bailey and I recently resigned my teaching position after a year of principal bullying and harassment.

Following five months of foot dragging, my harassment and retaliation cases were finally investigated.

Or were they?

The investigator did not even interview me and the one-sided report was riddled with fictional findings.

Here's an example emblematic of the whole.

A common retaliation act is changing the employee's job after she participates in a protected activity like filing a harassment complaint.

If it can be shown the violator knew of the complaint before the job reassignment, courts will accept the timing of the incident as proof of retaliation.

Knowing this, the report asserts the principal had decided to change my job before he learned of my complaint on March 30th and therefore the change was not retaliatory.

However, I have an email dated April 13th where the principal appeals to the building leadership team to create a new part-time music position combined with part-time reading.

That piecemeal position was then assigned to me the following week.

Which was clearly well after the principal knew my complaint.

There is no other way to explain it.

This finding was simply fabricated to fit the desired outcome.

But it gets even better.

The report states that the principal created the position to match my teaching strengths.

This is hilarious because the two formal observations the principal did of my teaching were in reading and he declared me unsatisfactory both times.

For this kind of harassment and mockery of justice to take place in an institution of education is indeed sad and shameful.

Do not allow other teachers to be entrapped and retaliated against.

Please rescind both the harassment and retaliation policies.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Peter Henry.

Thank you.

Hello Dr. Nyland and board members.

Thanks for the opportunity to address you tonight.

I am Peter Henry and I am the president of the Seattle Substitutes Association.

My fellow substitutes and I would like to share some concerns about prompt and accurate payment.

This is no reflection on the current director of payroll who has walked into a difficult Position and has been on the job for only a few months.

I've met with her productively twice to start a process to clarify the information on pay stubs.

Employees need to be paid on time with no surprises with a minimum of errors and when there are errors they need to be quickly and transparently resolved.

However work needs to be done.

You see here a petition that we gathered our recent all-day professional development that we put on.

There's over 50 subs to demand pay us promptly for our work.

And I asked people to share their particular situations.

Here's just a few.

Please respond to emails or answer phones.

My August pay was shorted.

Did not automatically get my pay increase after 60 days.

There are discrepancies in pay and timesheets that's very difficult to resolve.

I did not receive a pay bump for my 16 plus day job for two months and I'm still waiting.

So here are some problems I'm working on.

For the certificate substituted who earned a tri-pay this year, the pay was withheld with absolutely no explanation or prior notice.

Instead of being paid while we were working, we waited until September.

Substitutes are, teachers are still owed TriPay for past year's work and it's over three years, they're only going to get a partial payment.

I fully support the board's determination to assert your fiduciary responsibility by determining how and why your authority was bypassed but this is on the back of the subs.

Who knows how much longer they'll wait.

In the meantime, even though he resigned in April, near the time of the discovery of this failure, your past Director of Labor Relations was allowed to continue receiving his ample salary, probably $10,000 to $15,000 a month, by my estimate, through the end of September, as approved by you, the board, in your June meeting.

Seattle Public Schools needs to be more transparent and responsive in its treatment of all its employees, particularly us, the substitutes.

Thank you.

Thank you.

That concludes our list.

Is there anybody else who would like to come up to public to testify?

Okay that concludes our public testimony and now we are going to go into our board comments.

Director Harris.

Let's start with thank you's.

The Eckstein band and vocalist that was so extraordinary but I want to extend that to the parents who buy or rent instruments, who drive kids to practices, who auction and car wash and provide a booster club.

I think about this just like I did the Garfield Orchestra at Benaroya Hall last year.

Why can't we have this at every middle and high school?

If we are going to talk about equity, if we are going to talk about the opportunity gap, studies have shown that musicality Makes a huge difference in academics and especially math.

We've got to figure it out.

I appreciate we don't have enough dollars in the hopper.

I appreciate McCleary but we have to wrestle that talent and give them opportunity all over this district.

Other thank you's.

To the Washington Paramount Duty Group, Super Teachers, the folks that wrote the Amikai for the McCleary decision that was argued today, these are our parents.

These are people making the circle bigger, holding hands and making it happen and I could not be more proud of that kind of boots on the ground Walk in your talk.

I think it's a beautiful thing.

I hope we can exponentiate it.

I think some of the good things we are trying to do on community engagement have a leverage effect as well as a leverage effect with PTSA working on community engagement and inclusion.

So way to go to those folks.

The testimony yesterday in front of the legislative committee was awe inspiring especially from the youngsters that they're growing up the right way and it's a beautiful thing.

Thank you to the Genesee Hill and the Arbor Heights communities.

We were able to participate in the ribbon cutting and it was a blast and they are the beautiful schools.

They are beyond beautiful schools and Deputy Superintendent Nielsen I need you up here please.

I made a bet with this man this morning at opening and we're standing there with the mayor Everybody's looking all pretty and surrounded by hundreds of children and very happy parents.

And the deputy says next to the slide I sure wish I could be on that slide and I said 20 bucks do it.

There you go.

We have video.

You have to come to the board retreat on Saturday to see it and I'm going to work really hard at getting the engagement director to put it up on the website because you know what we can work hard and have a good time.

I think the joie de ver that's been displayed in this last week is something to be applauded and it makes us approachable as opposed to those folks over there.

We also sang happy birthday to the Genesee Hill principal at the opening which was fun.

Big welcome to the new middle college high school principal Jennifer Kniesley.

I hope I am not butchering her name.

Thanks to the folks in this building who recruited her for this job.

We still need some reconciliation.

We still need to look at the mission of middle college high school and if we have to wait till November to change the student assignment plan I'd be happy to bring forth a bar to address footnote number four that does not acknowledge middle college high school as an option school.

It makes me crazier than I already started.

Remember that we had 500 students in middle college high school in 2009 and now we I think we're below 125 in three different sites.

We can do better.

We must do better.

And I'm happy to put whatever effort that I'm called on to make that happen.

Schmitz Park that was an interesting and bizarre journey.

But there are young people in that building getting childcare right now.

There's the opportunity to have other community groups in there.

We need to have people in that building.

We also need to address the portable farm behind there because that is just a neon light for vagrants and copper stripping etc.

So thanks to the folks that helped on that.

I have some gray hairs to show for it but it happened.

We were approached by folks on the Mayor's Educational Summit.

To dine with them and they were rich and thoughtful conversations and my ask of those folks including Ron Sims one of the co-chairs who I have known and respected and mentored he has mentored me certainly for 30 years is that the fact that we are having those luncheons be on the mayor's task force page With the topics, with the attendees because I supremely object to the secrecy with which the summit task force issues have been addressed this last year.

Do I appreciate that folks are taking notice of the issues in this city?

Absolutely.

Do I object to the secrecy?

I absolutely do.

And I was pleased to be asked but that was my ask at the table.

Regarding transparency one of the things I am going to take a page from Director Burke's book and put my list of asks out here.

On our task force and committees pages we do not have up to date minutes.

Now we are doing a really good job in trying to bring forth the Community Engagement Task Force but folks need to be able to go to our website and find out what's going on.

I as a board member would very much appreciate that courtesy.

The other ask is the folks in teaching and learning the folks that are helping Garfield the folks that are talking about the opportunity gap if we could backtrack some And take a look at Chief Sealth International High School that started blending their honors program some three to four years ago.

Zero data.

If we're going to change things we need to be able to stand up and say we moved the needle.

We moved the needle because our theory of action was correct or it was not.

So I very much appreciate the lessons learned on that other than some pretty sketchy anecdotal information when requested.

Still need better answers on how many special ed kids are in the Seattle Preschool Partnership.

Need better information regarding the new EEU preschool issues that have come out but have not been explained and where we are going there.

And still need better explanations about some of our sped kids doing garbage and recycle duty.

If it's good enough for our sped kids it should be good enough for everybody.

And I appreciate that those are loaded issues and I appreciate that we need to talk more about them.

But thank you ever so much to the staff and the heavy lift to get school started.

Very exciting last week.

There's a big old clamor there to go next following in Leslie.

Thank you for your comments.

Thank you.

Good evening.

Boy I started out coming to this meeting today and listening to the Eckstein jazz band that was amazing you know definitely Seattle's got talent here what they did I was blown away and just listen that Young Lady Scat, too, that was a joy to listen to.

Welcome back to all the students out there for their 2016-17 school year and congratulations to the class of 2017 their senior year hopefully not too many will get the senioritis and also the new high school students that are just starting the ninth grade yes they are the class of 2020 you know I remember reading reports about you know 2020 was the vision we got a plan for the year 2020 it's going to be here soon.

Within our native community we talk about that seventh generation and when they first started talking about it we are in that seventh generation so we do want to see changes and thank you Ms. Simons for urging us to continue to make sure American Indians, indigenous people are being addressed and taken care of.

And also to the class of 2029 those that just started school here as kindergartners that they head off now on the journey that we see we close that achievement gap for every student that started in kindergarten they get through and graduate with a high school diploma.

Thank you to the Team Read program for coming and sharing the program and yes I will take your application and share that with others as one thing that I always again follow is the best way to learn is to teach and if we can get students teaching others we know that they have that capacity to learn and pass it on to the next generation.

Congratulations to Deborah Halperin with the math and science award.

My background is mathematics so good to see we are being acknowledged for what our teachers can do and even at the elementary level it is important that our students get that proper exposure.

And the Garfield honor for all in coming here to share their program appreciate what they have done.

Congratulations to Hazelwolf K-8 they started their new school today I was proud to be there for the ribbon cutting and the pre-tour and boy I do you know kind of feel sorry for the principal there for the first few days until that lawn rose in.

Where are the students going to go?

So hopefully that will be addressed and Loyal Heights yes I am still with you I do want to see what we can do and really clarify with that McCleary is it classroom size or student to teacher ratio that we are trying to address.

Are we building these buildings too big and taking away that recess time and students are aware they are going to play and get the exercise and so it still is an issue for me.

And listening to our last speaker it just kind of clicked with me with investigations you know this what she had to say that when we do investigation we do make sure we got to pull in the proper people because I was involved in an investigation and they never pulled in me and my family to talk to us.

They just gave us the decision afterwards and we were like wait why weren't we part of this investigation.

So whatever we have to do let's make sure that all parties get a chance to share what they have to say and it's not just based upon emails because it's a lot that can be read in emails because that's what I was told the investigation was done via emails what they saw was sent back and forth.

We need to pull the people in and talk to them directly so that I guess would be my ask if we can go in that direction.

My community meeting, I'll have one on September 17th at Broadview Library from 345 to 515. I know it seems like an odd time and no reflection of football that day.

I promise you that was more about the basis of what library is available.

Again, Broadview Elementary, September 17th, Saturday.

Thank you.

Speaking of September 17th, we're gonna have competing community meetings.

Mine will be from 3.30 to 5 at the High Point Library at 35th Avenue Southwest and Southwest Raymond Street.

They're pretty rowdy so come on down and we serve treats.

I am having problems getting into any of the West Seattle libraries and South Park does not have a meeting room so you know we may have to go half a street over on Roxbury and start having them at the Salvadorian bakery.

And it's a great place, it's a great meeting place and I well appreciate Director Blandford's caution to me that we are out of the district but it's only two lanes and it's well worth it and Anna is terrific and she supports the schools.

Thank you.

Dr. Geary.

Well welcome back everybody to school.

Always such a great time of year just I think everybody feels the excitement in the air looking forward to the new school year setting new goals.

So that's wonderful and I want to again thank we heard them before but again thank the Team Read folks and the words of Carissa Saunders We are just exceptional.

Somebody who has come through the program has done so much and I would like to see that piece of our video.

I hope we have it and we can get it and we can put it on our website specifically because I would love to forward that throughout the district so we have the voice of somebody who has come through our programs It has gone on to great success and has returned back to pay it forward, really.

So thank you so much to Team Reed and Ms. Saunders.

Ekstein Middle School, jazz band.

I am always just so amazed to listen to these kids and you have to pinch yourself and remember that they are kids.

High schoolers, they are not professionals because sometimes it is easy to forget that.

They are just so polished and so talented.

And Mr. Escobeda, I have the great fortune to thank a couple of teachers tonight that have actually taught my children.

And Mr. Escobeda is one of those revered people within our district.

So to Director Harris's point, If we are going to spread that kind of talent throughout our district or recreate those programs we have to find those people who it is clearly a passion for them to do that work and to create such talent year after year and I know from my own kids you know a little bit of fear in there maybe but so much respect for him and so much joy in the work that they did with him.

To Debbie Halperin, she has been a teacher at Laurelhurst Elementary since my sons were there, my son now in college.

Really just so focused on bringing to life mathematics for the kids at Laurelhurst Elementary.

And she is now at Thurgood Marshall and we wish her the best there and we are so proud of the work that she has done.

But I will say we will miss her very much and our district is very lucky to have somebody who is so dedicated to math and has been recognized for her efforts.

So good luck Debbie and I will look forward to an opportunity to thank you here in person as well.

I want to thank Garfield and coming out as a united group to show us what teachers can do when they come together and spread a message of inclusion.

And yes, I think we can do that at Ingram.

It's my understanding that the IBX students and the IB students are actually integrated fairly thoroughly.

So to the extent that Ingram is experiencing segregation, that would be potentially between the IB program And it gets back to what we can look at Rainier Beach and what they have done in order to eliminate some of those lines and incorporate and Chief South and integrate those populations.

It doesn't need to be necessarily, it's not always HCC and the rest of the school because I think What is apparent from our achievement gap is while we can point to those very clearly segregated schools, we have much smaller pockets of kids within our district that are being segregated in their schools to the same ill effect for those students and every student counts.

So we need to see and I would welcome every school groups of teachers coming before me week after week, month after month and saying that they are uniting together to bring Unity within their student population and to eliminate segregation.

So thank you to Garfield, but thank you to all of our teachers because I know right now that is such a focus and so many of them are working to eliminate that gap even if it is just for one or two kids in their classroom because that work is also incredibly important.

But we need the role models and we need the cheerleaders too.

I enjoyed my lunch with the Mayor's Ed Summit with Director Burke.

We had the pleasure of meeting the new President at Seattle Central College, Sheila Edwards-Lange, and the Mayor's team of Regina Jones, Dwayne Chappelle, and Robert Feldstein.

Great to make those connections.

Great to share ideas about how we can move our city forward as a whole.

But I appreciate Director Harris's remarks.

We can put our notes out because there were some really great ideas but those ideas are going to need the momentum of support throughout our city in order to make them happen.

So that's a great suggestion.

Thank you to Director Pinkham for So graciously removing the resolution that he heartfelt brought to us to pass, recognizing that once we heard from the community that we need to follow our own commands and go through the community engagement that we so often tell others that they need to do, but that I want to thank Director Pinkham specifically for always reminding us that we can continue to support the Native American cultures within our boundaries, that we need to continue to focus on how to bring that education, the education of those people to our country, which is our country's education and our history.

So continue to do that good work and thank you.

Thank you for your efforts.

Very important for all of us.

My meeting on September 24th I am going to be attending a WASDA meeting in Spokane so I didn't understand the conflict so my September 24th meeting will need to be rescheduled.

Please look for that.

I will continue to have my October 22nd and November 12th meetings at the Northeast Branch Library from 10 to 2. Thank you.

Dr. Burke.

Thanks everyone.

I also want to share the same level of awe and amazement about the Eckstein Jazz Band.

You can sit there, you can close your eyes, you can listen to it and it's amazing and then you open your eyes and you say wait a minute.

These are not, you know these are our students, these are middle school students that it's mind blowing.

It leaves me wanting more so I'll have to go hunt that down.

I want to also formally welcome Dr. Konoshita.

Thanks for joining.

Looking forward to working on a lot of great projects together.

And second the shout out or third the shout out for Team Reed.

We've heard about him at multiple meetings and I appreciate the clarity in today's presentation about the stability of the core model because I think we're looking at that model that includes a peer component, it includes a compensation component, it fires on so many cylinders.

I love the idea of finding ways to replicate it.

I had mentioned at the previous board meeting the idea of numeracy.

Thanks Dr. Nyland for bringing that up.

Other community organizations that would like to take that on or staff finding ways to leverage that proven program to help our kids with numeracy intervention is a brilliant idea.

Start of school, super exciting.

Another great success, a team effort in so many ways that have already been mentioned so I won't touch on too many of them.

The new buildings, new experiences.

The enthusiasm is, you can feel it everywhere.

You can feel it in this building.

You can feel it in the individual schools.

It's a great, great energy.

Another place that we can feel it as board directors is in our email and I am not sure as this is my first start of school so I would have to look to my colleagues but given the number of moving pieces with our delayed start times, our new building opening and just the reality of starting school I am surprised at the The volume of email is quite manageable at this moment.

So I just want to put that out as a measure of success for all the people that are committing their time to that.

And as the husband of an educator I know what that looks like.

For our educators they are working on their class lists, their lesson plans, their classroom prep.

They are going to far more meetings than they would like to go to.

So my heart goes out to all of them and my gratitude.

I would like to also share thanks for the dedication of the Garfield team for coming out and communicating your vision, your innovative ideas.

I would like to be a champion and an enabler for these ideas but I have indicated before that there are places where we as a district we have got to figure out how to Provide consistent guidance and provide enough resources that schools can innovate in these ways because schools that innovate and succeed we consider them success stories and we look for ways to emulate them.

Schools that innovate and don't succeed we call them rogue and so putting the right level of autonomy and oversight and support So that these staffs that pull together and commit to educational delivery that could potentially be outside the normal boundaries of what we're doing I think is just something we have to keep talking about and figuring out how to find that balance.

I'll speak to my specific concern because I just want to have that publicly out there We say as a district, I say we on the board, on the staff, our educators, we talk about differentiation and differentiation is a big word and so differentiation being the key to success of many of our educational initiatives means that we have to do a deep dive on what differentiation means.

Because again as a husband of an educator I've heard stories I haven't experienced as much personally but I can understand that differentiation over a super wide range is a super huge challenge and so finding the right level of how we create differentiation environments, how we provide differentiation tools and how we measure differentiation results is an important part of when we use that word.

So I just want to caution us staff and our education community to be absolutely deliberate in your tactics.

Leave nothing to chance and do what you have to do to meet the kids where they are and take them where they need to go.

Quick words to some of our speakers.

Ms. Simmons thank you for your clarity on the racial imbalance comments.

This was your clarity was what I lacked when I was trying to pull that item from the consent agenda.

Finding ways that we can identify leverage points and Tools that can be brought to bear to improve our demographics and our equity balance I think is really an important aspect.

Ms. Bailey full disclosure my first testimony I was taught how to testify by Pat Bailey.

Your testimony to us for me especially has been heartbreaking and I just want to thank you for your service and for the people you have touched, the students and the adults.

And then the payroll concerns on the substitutes.

I guess I would like to ask staff for a board update on that.

I think I heard some really valid concerns and also recognize that that's an interesting staffing challenge to maintain continuity and be timely in payments.

But payroll is a pretty important part of what we do.

So I would ask for a brief board update via a Friday memo on what sort of challenges we are facing and how we are addressing those.

In closing I am trying to line up my community meeting schedule for the rest of the year.

I have a couple of work constraints that I am trying to dance around so I haven't completely booked my September and October meetings yet but I will have those announcements out shortly and up on the web.

Thank you very much.

Director Peters.

Well welcome back everybody and I want to wish everybody a very inspiring, safe and successful new school year.

You know we just had a few speakers tonight but they provided a great illustration of the complexity of our district.

They brought to our attention lots of issues that are deep And intertwined and what makes this such a challenging and rich experience to try and make this district work for all our students.

I want to try and match the very thoughtful testimony we had tonight with some thought and my response is here.

So like everybody I really appreciated the Eckstein jazz band, I wonder if that was a senior jazz band but they were just very polished and it's always stunning to find out how young these kids are, what a wonderful future they have and again this is one of the Seattle Public School District's amazing strengths is the music program in our district.

Um, I'm excited about all the new buildings that have been opening and I think it shows that the district has finally come to terms with the fact that we're a growing city and people do have enough faith in the public school system that they are bringing their kids to us and we need to find safe new or clean spaces for them plus we have to meet all these new mandates about having smaller class sizes which is a great thing but it does also pose a challenge.

Team Reed again it was wonderful to have them present to us and what a wonderful speaker.

It's a great program that the district does and anything we can do to support it I think is something that this board will get behind.

My community meeting I am afraid I had to reschedule from last week but it will be this Sunday from 1 to 3 o'clock at the Magnolia library.

I was called out of town last week on a family emergency so I apologize for that change in schedule.

But I will be there and I ask for two hours of the time there.

And so please come and bring me any of your issues and any of your comments.

Let's see.

The Mayor's Summit.

I had the opportunity earlier in the summer to sit in for Director Patu at the Mayor's meeting, those closed door sessions that Director Harris has referred to.

And I was delightfully surprised to find that it was a very welcoming and constructive conversation going on with a lot of people with a lot of good ideas.

What I did notice though was it was incredibly helpful to have board directors speaking directly to city to city people and to the other members of the community because there's so much that hasn't been conveyed very clearly and we would all greatly benefit from talking more and getting on the same page.

So I know an issue came up and some people in the group I was with didn't realize that the district had already Allocated some funds for IB you know so communication will go a long way to getting everybody on the same page so that we can work together on meeting the needs of our 53,000 students and while maintaining the separation of powers of a school district and a city.

The McCleary hearings are going on let's hope there is some progress there I think we are going to have to keep making do without the funds that are there and continue to make fiscally responsible decisions with the resources we have but let's keep the pressure on to meet the fundamental needs And our paramount duty to pay for public education for all of our students.

It is, after all, a fundamental pillar of democracy to provide a solid, inspired education for all students of any means.

Following up from that I would like to welcome Dr. Kyle Kinoshita or Kinoshita.

Wonderful to have you in such an important position you have as the Chief of Curriculum and Instruction.

Arguably it is our core mission.

So anything that I can do, that the board can do to help you, please let us know and let's talk vision, let's talk future, let's talk different styles of learners in our district and how we can meet those different needs and how we can embrace the diversity of our district and make it a strength because one of the things I've been concerned about tonight Is a sense that there is opposition within our communities or at our schools between different groups of children and different learners and that troubles me greatly because that leads to divisions.

If there are divisions there then let us address them in a positive way but please let us not throw anybody under the bus.

Let's not assume the worst of any particular students or their families.

I think every family here wants the same thing.

They want the needs of their unique child to be met by this district and I don't think anybody is saying they want that at the expense of anybody else.

And so I'm really going to urge everybody to move forward in all these interesting new efforts to meet the needs of students in a positive, constructive way that does not impugn other students or other families and does not assume the worst of others.

Or assume the worst of the district.

I think the district has made some decisions that perhaps have had some consequences that were unintended whether we are talking about what was said tonight about the IBX program or any of the programs we do.

I don't think these decisions were made with malintent but I think we have had some consequences and some outcomes that aren't quite what we expected and perhaps we need to address those.

So I'll actually come back to that in a few minutes.

The issue of recess was brought up tonight.

Excuse me for a second.

And I would like to reiterate my support of making recess more of an embedded embrace part of our school day.

And I am wondering if we can combine our added 20 minutes that we are going to have to add to our day in a year or so with the pleas from our community, our lunch and recess groups to have recess, longer recess during the day, to have the recess placed before lunch.

And combine that also with the recommendations that were recently brought to the board and the district from the prismatic study that was done on our nutrition services and that study put forth the recommendation that children have recess before lunch and the recommendation that our lunch times be longer.

Both of those could be addressed through policy.

And I would like to put forth and ask my colleagues to look at those two recommendations because these again address the fundamentals and if we can address the fundamentals, making sure our children are well rested, which is one of the reasons we changed the bell times, making sure our children are able to exercise and they have sound bodies and minds, making sure they have time to eat, these will go a long way to address all the different gaps.

we're dealing with in the district.

I absolutely believe that and I believe there's research to support that.

I would like to thank Principal Howard and all the teachers from Garfield for coming out here tonight because they are trying to do something to address an issue that is significant, is important and that is you know we have a wide range of students from various backgrounds and different needs, how do we address all their needs and that is what they are trying to do with their honors for all plan.

And as Director Burke so eloquently pointed out it is a challenge to put a wide spectrum of needs and abilities in one classroom.

I admit to being concerned that we are asking our teachers to do a great deal and so if they are going to do this they need all the support possible.

I also, bringing up a point I think was brought up by Director Harris, I believe we need to have some kind of way to measure outcomes.

We need to know where we're starting, where we're going and whether it's succeeding.

And if it is, great, let's replicate it.

If it isn't, what do we do to tweak it or do we discontinue it?

So we need to go beyond just the hope that these changes will work.

We need to be able to prove that yes, this is benefiting our students.

I am hopeful that these changes will work.

In the case of honors for all, my own brother has been a teacher of language arts for 30 years in one of the largest high schools in the San Francisco Bay Area.

He has very diverse student population and they have done something similar and I said to him, is it possible to do this?

Is it possible to succeed?

And he said, yes it is.

It is hard work but it is possible.

Now having said that I implore people not to make this a zero sum game, not to pit students against each other or the needs of students against each other and to be mindful of the fact that we do have legal mandates to meet the needs of our highly capable students.

And that their needs are designated as part of basic education.

And so being able to keep them where they are engaged has to be a part of this discussion.

Then the questions that I have for the staff at Garfield.

They mentioned, they said in their statement to us that there is very little upward movement to honors classes from the general education track.

What is great about Garfield is all the classes are open to all students.

So if there hasn't been movement I would like to know why.

What are the barriers?

Because if there is no artificial barrier there what are the ones?

And if they are psychological, if they have to do with the students own belief in themselves we have got to address that.

Simply putting the kids together in a classroom alone, that alone is not going to address some of the bigger issues.

If we have biases where we are not encouraging children we have to address that.

This is a much bigger deeper discussion and I am very happy to have this discussion but there is a lot of questions on how to really address these issues.

You know we had another teacher speak to us about the IBX program at Ingram and I was a little confused about by that testimony and I appreciate Director Geary's thoughtful take on that.

I do want to point out that again that was an effort by the district to try and fix something and one of them was That Garfield was getting too crowded so they created another pathway.

They went and studied a model from I think it was Interlake High School in Bellevue who had also done something similar.

So it wasn't just a random idea.

It was a lot of thought went into that and it has been somewhat successful in taking the pressure of the high numbers of students who were going to Garfield, taking some of the capacity pressure off of Garfield.

I also want to caution against stereotyping any children, any children.

There are about 1500 students at Garfield and I ask is it reasonable or is it fair to impugn hundreds of students with the ignorant hateful words of one?

The person who spoke tonight, the teacher mentioned a comment that was made apparently by a student that was very ugly.

But that student doesn't speak for all students and doesn't speak for whatever particular group that student is in and we have to steer away from broad brush comments and implications because that's the very point of what we're trying to fight against.

We do not want to stereotype any of our kids and make presumptions.

On the issue of Loyal Heights, again I want to follow up with Dr. Herndon about the options we have to reclaim the playground space from the preschool Buildings that are sketched out for that particular plan and I believe that will require more conversation and follow up.

But I am definitely sensitive to what the parents have brought to us about worrying about having a mega school, not having room for play and I think we do need to build, make buildings that will have growing room for the future but we also need to address the very real needs of the children right now and they do need play space and parents do need to feel that their children are not going to be lost in some giant factory of a school.

So anything we can do to assuage parents would be wonderful.

So even though I have said a lot there's always something I forget to say.

So I'm just going to have a Quick look.

Again, like I said, I'm always inspired by the speakers who come to us because they're so thoughtful and they bring so many complex issues.

So it's hard not to respond in kind.

I think actually I will sign off there.

Thank you all for listening and thank you all for coming tonight.

I too would like to join my colleagues in welcoming everybody back to a new school year.

I had the opportunity to pick up my daughter at one of our schools this morning or this afternoon and it was so fascinating to see kids that she started kindergarten with who are now eighth graders and they are walking like they own the school and seeing their parents and reflecting very deeply on How kind of crazed the looks were on the faces of parents when we first met each other as kindergarteners and knowing that their path each child will have an individual path through Seattle Public Schools but by and large many of those paths will be wildly successful and so it was very exciting just to renew, to start all over again.

Director Burke said something about reflecting as he was listening to the Eckstein jazz band and I was doing the same thing because as an eighth grader I played in a jazz band in Fairbanks, Alaska and we weren't nearly as good as the Eckstein band was so I was thinking about the difference between the two things and if you were paying attention I ran out of the room really quickly and grabbed my daughter my eighth grade I had a non-jazz loving daughter and pulled her in here so that she would have the opportunity to hear what her peers are doing.

She was impressed but she didn't change her kind of orientation towards not being the jazz fan that her father is.

I wanted to give a A huge shout out to all of the capitals staff here at Seattle Public Schools.

I going back reflecting again before I became a school board director I was on the board of schools first and I remember when we were discussing the levy that many of the buildings that are now online they were just kind of in the concept phase and we were looking at a huge number For how much we would have to go out to the Seattle voters and say you know these are our grand designs for these buildings and will you support them?

And as I was sitting at the ribbon cutting for the Seattle World School last week I was reflecting on that moment and thinking It was with a lot of trepidation that we were going out in a recession and asking for a lot of money from Seattle voters and they came through and I believe our capital staff came through on the promise that was made in that levy and so I haven't had the opportunity to see all the new buildings that have come online but If the Seattle World School is representative of all of them, there are fabulous new buildings that our kids will be welcomed into and their families will be welcomed into and so I'm very excited about and proud to have any role in that.

I wanted to thank Carissa and Maureen for presenting on Team Read.

It's a great thing to get a double dose of that.

We got it what two weeks ago and then here we are again learning about the program which has always been one of my favorite programs.

I shared last two weeks ago that many of the elements that were shared about the theory of action are exactly the elements that we want.

In our collaborations with community based organizations so again to be able to hear that and to have our community know the good work that is being done by Team Reed is very exciting.

I wanted to welcome Kyle Kinoshita to Seattle Public Schools.

Kyle and I are both graduates of the leadership for learning program at the University of Washington and I got to know him very briefly In a few interactions and was thrilled when I got the email that said that he was joining the staff here at Seattle Public Schools.

So again Dr. Konoshta welcome.

And reflecting again on the University of Washington I was thinking about a speaker that came and spoke there last year Whose name is John Diamond and along with a woman named Amanda Lewis they wrote a book called Despite the Best Intentions, How Racial Inequity Thrives in Good Schools.

And I was thinking about it because it reflects so powerfully on the presentation that was made by Garfield, by the staff of Garfield.

As a matter of fact when When Dr. Lewis came and presented at the University of Washington I had the chance to ask him some questions afterwards and his theory of action they went into a school and spent quite a bit of time there.

Struggling to understand why it is that in a school where the parents and the students and the community and the school district all, you can't point to a person and say that person is racist.

That person does not want our students of color to be successful.

In spite of that fact they have huge disparities in one high school and so they strove to understand what are the dimensions that allow that to happen.

And you know when I think of Garfield as I was reading this book I was thinking this could be Garfield.

He could be describing Garfield to a T.

There is almost no exception in what he was describing about this school that doesn't apply to Garfield.

And I should back up and say I know Garfield fairly well.

It's the closest school to my home.

I've spent a lot of time in that school.

And the impetus or the findings that doctors Lewis and Diamond came up with was that we need to do a better job of Incentivizing teachers like the teachers who came to us and presented today to use the knowledge that they have of the barriers that are present in our schools and their willingness to be able to overcome those barriers.

We need to embrace that.

We need to embrace the innovation and the energy that they bring to their work and remove the systemic and structural barriers that allow Achievement and opportunity gaps to fester and you know this is a real issue.

It has been mentioned and I think it bears mentioning that Seattle Public Schools has the fifth largest gap achievement and opportunity gap of any school, large school district in the nation and so this is a real thing.

It is a phenomenon that plays out in all of our schools right now.

And so my hope is that in spite of the challenges and in spite of the lack of data and in spite of the other obstacles that are sometimes put in front of us that we are powerfully motivated to stay focused on this issue so that we can make some progress.

I believe it is wrong for us to try to find a person or some one thing that we can pin all of our hopes on or demonize and say that is responsible for achievement and opportunity gaps.

Our achievement and opportunity gaps are built on the fact that there is structural racism in the United States, are built on the fact that we live in one of the most segregated cities in the United States and until we address all of those things we will have very little progress that will be made and I think in many ways that was the conclusion that The two doctors, the two researchers came up with in this book.

Again I want to mention the name of it in case you missed it.

It is despite the best intentions how racial equity thrives in good schools and it is a fascinating book I think it's a book that all of All of the students at the University of Washington College of Ed are reading currently and so it is something that many of them will come to us or come to other school districts with that frame of mind and so if you have the opportunity to dig into that I think it explains some of the questions that we have heard or that we have raised around this dais tonight.

And finally to get off of my soapbox I will note that I'll have a community meeting on the 17th and probably get on my soapbox there but on the 17th of September at 10 o'clock at the Capitol Hill branch of the Seattle Public Libraries and then on October the 15th and November the 12th both at Douglas Truth all of them start at 10 o'clock.

On Saturdays I always share the fact that we have rambunctious meetings and usually there's a lot of learning on both sides of the table and so I encourage you if you have the opportunity to come to that.

Thank you.

Also I would like to welcome Kyle Kinoshita for actually for being part of Seattle Public Schools had a chance to actually to get to meet him and say a little bit about what's happening here and he seemed to really enjoying himself so far.

And we hope that continue on.

I also would like to congratulate and thank you to the Team Read and also for Ms. Sanders for the motivating, what she shared with us, her story about how she became a Team Read.

Yes, I took a lot of your applications and definitely will pass them out to each one of my high schools.

Also would like to thank you to Principal Howard and his Garfield staff for the wonderful presentation.

It's always wonderful when you have staff coming together with their principal to see changes take place and it's actually, it's a wonderful feeling to know that you are coming together to make those changes at Garfield.

So thank you and continue on in that direction.

Also, I like to say thank you to Mr. Escobeda and such a wonderful Eckstein jazz band.

They are an excellent, You know, I think we all kind of taken back thinking that they were high school kids and yet they're middle school kids who actually play just tremendously.

So thank you so much for that and really appreciate the music.

And also I want to say thank you to, I was able to have the opportunity to be at all five schools that were open this year.

And usually on the you know as a board director we vote on the SBACs and but we never actually get to see the buildings.

So just being there and be able to see the building in front of you become a reality and see walking in and see all the wonderful things there and I kept saying to our to our staff you guys outdid yourself.

These are beautiful school buildings and The communities and the students couldn't wait to be a part of this new school year because of these buildings and I want to say thank you to Thornton Creek, Hazel Wolf, Arbor Heights, Genesee Hill, World Language School for their vote to get these schools built and also the continued support that they provide for these communities so that way every one of those students that attend those schools actually Have all that support from the parents and community and really, really it's wonderful things to actually to start school in a brand new school.

And I also would like to thank Dr. Herndon and Richard Best and all the team, Capitol staff for doing an amazing job in building those beautiful schools.

I was saying that too bad they were not the one that actually designed a lot of our schools in the southeast.

It would have been a lot more roomier.

But anyway, also I would like to say to Miss Bailey, I am really sorry for what you have gone through and as a past staff person, I really believe that no staff should have to be harassed and intimidated by anyone, no matter what, and that every staff should be treated Fairly and should be given the opportunity to excel in many ways and be able to give the support that we can for each one of our staff that works in Seattle Public Schools.

My next meeting actually will be in September 24th at the same place at Cafe Vita from 10 o'clock to 11.30.

And also to Dr. Simmons, thank you for that testimony.

I definitely will look into that and see whether just getting us to actually to realize sometimes we But like I said, we vote on these buildings and we hear about schools move from one area to the next.

But sometimes as board directors, we really don't realize, you know, what's the imbalances that's happening in a lot of those schools.

So thank you for that testimony is something that we'll definitely look into it.

And so I think that's, I don't think I missed anything, but I would actually would have asked the board to take a 10 minute break and then come back and continue our meeting.