School Board Meeting Date 10122016 Part 2

All right, thank you.

That was incredible.

I'd like to invite Gail Morris to come up and complete her remarks and then I'll read the proclamation for Indigenous Peoples Day.

Hello of course because I cannot do this work alone.

I do it with many people who work right alongside of me.

I would like to introduce Shanna Brown who is the lead writer for the Since Time Immemorial curriculum and also is a teacher for Robby Thompson in the middle school and then Janine Tillotson who is a Title I consulting teacher for Huchoosedah and is all over.

And they would like to give an update.

Hi thank you so much.

I feel like there is great momentum in Seattle Public Schools and I am very proud of that.

I am very proud to be a part of that.

There are so many middle school teachers who were social studies teachers last year who were trained in STI and who are using it and this year we are working toward all of those elementary teachers being trained as well.

And it's been such a long time in coming and I appreciate so much the reception that Seattle Public Schools has given this legislation and we want to keep it going.

When I see our trainings, our trainings are full and our teachers are revved up and they are ready.

And we are ready to make that next step.

STI has been all about relationships so it's really important that that we continue this work along with the district in order to continue those relationships.

I really urge us to start thinking about training our teacher leaders within the schools.

When we have those teacher leaders in the schools we are passing the baton and the program becomes stronger than the people and it becomes embedded into our system and it grows stronger each year.

there is that need for training in the schools.

When we are able to go to those school communities and build those relationships we are so much better able to support those teachers and they are so much the better in terms of being able to try something new, not be afraid and be the teachers that they want to be.

Thank you.

Hello I'm Janine Tillotson I'm an enrolled member of the Tlingit tribe of Alaska and this is my 23rd year with Seattle Public Schools.

I graduated from Roosevelt as did both of my children who now work for our tribal corporation.

I want to thank you for celebrating Indigenous Peoples Day and I wanted to let you know that in my work I get around to most of the schools in the school district and I was really proud and energized on Monday when I went around to visit a lot of schools and see what they were doing for indigenous people's day to celebrate.

There was a notice put out in the principal communicator directing principles to mention indigenous people's day in their daily announcement or bulletin.

And on top of that a lot and a resource list as well for teachers to use.

I wanted to mention many schools that we went to that we saw great things happening and I know we are forgetting some so I apologize but at Licton Springs the assembly warmed my heart because it started from kindergarten and it went to eighth grade.

The kindergarten first and second told a Snohomish legend, the third grade Class sang a song called 1492 by Nancy Schimel and it starts, I'll only read the first verse.

In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

It was a courageous thing to do but someone was already there.

So that was the third graders sang that song.

The fourth and fifth graders put together a history of how indigenous people's day was adopted by the city of Seattle and the school district.

And the sixth through eighth graders did something that gave chills to me.

They read the United Nations declaration of indigenous people's rights.

Which I'd never heard before I hate to say.

It was a powerful, powerful assembly and I'm really proud of the Licton Springs staff and students.

Green Lake also had a Native Alaskan group, it's my tribe, it's Honde E. Gin.

Many Seattle Public Schools kids danced in that assembly.

South Shore, Saundra who was here gave an assembly.

Leschi had a great program, Washington, Highland Park, Chief Sealth, Chief Sealth, Alki.

Am I forgetting anybody?

Anyway we are really proud of the schools and the principals and how they incorporated the indigenous peoples day curriculum into their schools.

And so the last thing I wanted to say is I am not sure when Shanna, I don't know if you guys know that Shanna was recognized by the White House for her work so we are very proud of her and her since time immemorial curriculum is getting out in the schools and despite Gail and Shanna's good work when I go around and meet with principals and teachers I hate to say it but there's many of them who still look at me and say what's STI?

So I would like to lobby for us being able to present at an all principals meeting so that once again all the principals know what since time immemorial is that it's mandated and that we can help them help their teachers.

Thank you.

So I would like to end by saying that.

is a lot of schools are having ongoing indigenous people's day assemblies and we keep hearing about them.

There's ongoing lesson plans happening.

Chief Sealth is actually going to be on the 27th and it's going to be student led by Shikachi our classroom as well as Pacific Islander group as well as Proyecto Saber and an Aztec group are going to come in and they're going to have that on October 27th and I'll give you that information if you'd like to attend.

And then we go into Native American history month so it is ongoing for the next two months we are pretty booked out and we would be happy to pass on that information.

I just want to raise my hands to these two ladies because they have helped so much in you know getting the word out for the need for identity safety in the schools.

We know it is happening.

Not all schools are doing it but we want to raise our hands to the schools that are doing it.

And I just want to say that just in the almost three years that I have been here Shanna and I have trained Approximately 233 teachers in the STI and that doesn't include the teachers that go outside of Seattle to OSPI and get the extra training or the field at reservations and tribal schools.

And train the trainers.

Yes that is our next big move.

So we are waiting to get funding to pursue six more trainings this year.

Clicko clicko.

Thank you so much.

So our proclamation based on the resolution from the Board of Directors from two years ago says whereas the school board recognizes that the indigenous peoples of the lands that would later become known as the Americas have occupied these lands since time immemorial.

The school board recognizes the fact that Seattle is built upon the homelands and villages of the indigenous peoples of this region without whom the building of the city would not have been possible.

The school board values the many contributions made to our community through indigenous people's knowledge, labor, technology, science, philosophy, arts and the deep cultural contribution that substantially shaped the charter of the city of Seattle.

The school board has a responsibility to oppose the systematic racism.

towards indigenous peoples in the United States which perpetuates high rates of poverty and income equality, exacerbating disproportionate health, education and social crises.

The school board seeks to combat prejudice and eliminate discrimination stemming from colonization and to promote awareness, understanding and good relations among indigenous peoples and all other segments of our district.

The school board promotes the closing of the equity gap for indigenous peoples through policies and practices that reflect the experiences of indigenous peoples, ensure greater access and opportunity and honor our nation's indigenous roots, history and contributions.

Our state law, Senate Bill 5433 requires the teaching of the history, government, and contemporary issues of the 29 federally recognized tribes of Washington state.

The school board directors amended policy number 2336 required observances to observe the second Monday of October as indigenous people's day.

Therefore, we certainly do encourage all schools to support the well-being and growth of American Indian and indigenous students and recognize the contributions of native peoples on October 10 indigenous peoples day.

So again thank you to Gail and her team for making materials available to our teachers and our schools in that endeavor.

I would also recognize that tonight is Yom Kippur and we will work to do a better job of scheduling our board meetings for the future in order to honor and acknowledge our staff and colleagues who celebrate this important day of atonement.

Eliminating opportunity gaps is one of our goals that has been set by the school board and I certainly appreciate the board's continued focus on that.

Now in the third year it allows us to do some things over time that we would not have been able to do Otherwise, we do recognize that although we have exemplary student performance across the district we still have large and unacceptable opportunity gaps for many groups of our students that we have not served as well as we should.

And as we heard earlier with the Nesholm presentation we do have many schools that are leading the way statewide in helping us figure out how to close those gaps.

We do have 17 initiatives internally working on closing opportunity gaps and appreciate the board's vote to put financial support behind those goals.

Externally the mayor's summit and many of our community-based organizations have come forward to offer support.

Most recently the mayor put $1.5 million into his budget recommendation that would support this work.

Our website now features much of this work so thank you to Carrie Campbell and her team for getting that information pulled together and on the website.

And we will be launching kind of the publicity portion of our work because the work has been ongoing in our schools for the last two years.

October 19 is the day that the Seattle Education Association is named as a day of solidarity and we certainly saw during our tri-day, whatever that stands for, our professional development day for all of our teachers before the first day of school.

It was around building relationships and making sure that all of our students feel welcome in our schools and certainly appreciate the support of SEA, our teachers association and PASS, our principals association in all of the work that is being done in schools.

To say that the lives of our black students and our students of color matter a great deal and we need to continue our work to figure out how we can collectively affirm and uplift each and every one of our students.

The school board has been engaged in quite a few work sessions over the last few weeks.

There are many, I think we call it here a jigsaw, we've also called it air traffic control and trying to land lots of issues in a timely fashion.

We do have the survey out for a few more days with regard to how we might extend the school year from now where we would add 20 minutes whether it's at the beginning, at the end, or a little bit of both.

We also have many people here tonight to testify on the boundary issue which is coming before the board over the next couple of board sessions.

And those decisions need to be made so that we can let the bids for transportation for the coming year.

At this time I would like to introduce Dr. Flip Herndon, associate superintendent for facilities to come and comment briefly, well maybe not quite so briefly, on some of the efforts that have been underway.

There have been a lot of community meetings, more to come and a lot of decisions coming before the board some of which have been in the works for a number of years and some challenges for us as we face continued lack of space across the district.

Thank you.

Flip Herndon the associate superintendent for facilities and operations.

So I just wanted to talk briefly about some of the high points that we are looking at when considering the growth boundaries for introduction tonight and then action in a few weeks.

First and foremost I do want to acknowledge that as we are looking at these particular changes that are impacting our families that we realize that behind every number there is a student, there is a face.

It impacts students and families deeply.

So I don't want that to be lost on anybody as staff, as board members, as community.

We do recognize the real impact that it does have on families.

We also realize that we are in a city that is growing tremendously.

We have a real challenge for our spaces as many schools that are being impacted probably realize.

Several of them have multiple portables on site which are a real challenge and we are not able to build our schools fast enough to create additional space.

Which is one of the reasons why we are embarking on these boundary changes that were voted on back in 2013. Additionally while this particular set of boundary changes are happening we do realize that there are additional boundary changes coming in the recent years past and coming years forward up until 2020. This year's implementations however are some of the biggest that are happening in that seven-year span.

So we do realize that the impact is significant.

And while not all schools, we didn't have the opportunity to get out to all schools.

We have held community meetings in several areas.

We had some this spring.

We've had ongoing meetings in the fall as well.

We received a tremendous amount of email which I'm sure you have too.

Comment cards and feedback.

We've heard from several people about many different issues.

As the superintendent has spoken to we also know that time is important and we do have other decisions that need to be made in order to make sure that families by the time we have open enrollment that starts in the middle of February are able to make some informed choices about where they would like to go to school.

Lastly two other issues, three other issues that I would like to get to.

One is that we have also been operating under the basic parameters that in 2013 when the board made the decisions about these boundaries and implementations over the years the direction has been to take a look each year and see if there is any new or significant data that is impacting the decisions at that time.

And that is basically what we have been doing every year.

It is a challenge.

There are times when new data does suggest that we look at something else but The basic goal was not to try and redraw the boundaries every single year but just basically review that.

There was one for this particular set of boundary implementations there was one specific request that came from the board last year and that was to look at the John Rogers Cedar Park and Olympic Hills boundary area.

There had been a lot of feedback about that particular designation of where lines might be so there was a concerted effort to take a look at that.

A lot of conversations with community and staff and principals and also a very conscientious and pertinent effort to apply the race and equity toolkit as well.

And in that there were over a dozen scenarios taken a look at.

None of the solutions are perfect.

None of them get 100% buy-in.

But ultimately we're trying to figure out a way that we can serve all of our students and we want to make sure that no matter what school our students go to that they have the appropriate support and services available to them to make them all successful.

Ultimately that's what we want to see in any of the boundary changes that we have so that families and parents can know that whatever their school is if there's a change they're going to be well supported in their new school as well as their old school.

One of the bigger challenges that we've also heard about for this year is the issue of grandfathering and having parents be able to stay and students be able to stay at the school where they've developed a lot of ties.

So we had an initial set of recommendations and we've heard plenty of feedback to see if we can expand that so we've certainly tried to take some analysis to see what the impact would be and I can talk about that later.

And lastly one of the other areas that we have been asked to take a look at is around advanced learning and pathways for students.

So initially we were looking at that in the student assignment plan and we realized that there is a concern to make sure that families know what that might be sooner rather than later so we are also taking that into consideration as well.

So those are a couple of the very high points around this issue.

Clearly, we'll get into more information and questions and comments when we have the introduction a little bit later tonight.

Thank you very much.

As Flip says we continue to be challenged by capacity issues.

We grew by 650 students this year and invented 90 classrooms across the district and opened five new schools for about 150 new classrooms.

So thanks to the voters we are building as fast as we can but we are also having to take over more and more spaces within buildings to try to find enough spots for all of our students.

Transportation continues to A do quite well with regard to the bell times and the changes however we do have some hot spots that have been running late and part of that is I guess our economy is improving and bus drivers are hard to come by so that's proving to be somewhat of a challenge for us.

Another one of the issues that the board looked at recently was the issue of how do we transport students to athletic competitions given the pushing back of our high schools to start later in the morning.

That means they get out later in the afternoon and that means that they could miss more time to get to athletic competitions.

And so transportation has been working on that with principals and they are moving toward I think their preferred option is to figure out how to lease vans that would allow for coaches to participate in transportation, transporting of students and that allows us to have students, the goal is to have students miss no more than one period at the end of the school day.

One of the other board goals was in the area of community engagement and wow I won't take time to go through all of these in great detail but there has been a lot of work.

Carrie Campbell and Director Harris have been working with a task force around this issue.

The training for increasing community engagement was provided for senior leadership in this building last week.

We had an opportunity to meet with about 60 of our community-based organizations a week ago and share with them our goals and talk about how they can help with attendance and building relationships with students.

We also met with the Seattle Council of PTSA and talked about the partnership work that we have underway with them and how they can support our work to eliminate opportunity gaps.

That was followed with I think a meeting last night here with regard to presentation to the school-based leadership for all of the PTSA's in the district.

We have had several meetings internally with our staff.

It was reported recently in the Puget Sound Business Journal that Seattle is the 21st largest employer in the state of Washington.

So our 6 to 8,000 employees depending on whether we count full-time or all of our part-time staff are one of our major communicators with regard to the work that's happening in our district.

Several of our staff went to the black prisoners caucus in Monroe this last week to hear further about how important the work is to close opportunity gaps for our students.

Equity and Race Advisory Committee also has been meeting.

We have 20 schools that have race and equity teams now and we will be expanding that by 10 additional schools over the next few weeks.

And finally, I think it's finally.

Our budget staff met recently with community representatives as well to share more information on how our budget is being put together and how we are moving forward in that regard.

I guess added to that internally we are beginning the conversations around weighted staffing formulas and trying to at least be clearer about that formula and how it works.

Although like many things until McCleary there is not ever enough to go around to all the needs that we try to meet with that funding.

As I've said before the school visits are one of the highlights of my week.

In the last few weeks I've had the opportunity to visit Beacon Hill, Queen Anne, Broadview Thompson and today Cascadia.

Thank you to Director Peters and Director Harris for joining me on some of those walks.

Of note this year particularly because of our district-wide professional development on relationship building it's been very heartwarming to see how each school has picked up that work and reflected it in different ways to make all of their students feel welcome and have a sense of belonging.

At Beacon Hill they had taken I guess we call them meta moments.

No.

Metamoments and what students can do if they are feeling a little out of control or out of sorts.

And Beacon Hill had translated that into what can you do specifically in this classroom when you are feeling that way.

So in addition to the poster they had things like You could go to the quiet timeout corner in the room, you could go to a buddy spot in a neighboring classroom, you could ask the teacher to read quietly for five minutes and some other, each teacher did their own but kind of a variation on what we sometimes see which is you know first demerit, second demerit, third demerit and a more positive way to engage students.

Queen Anne Elementary.

had 15 fifth grade citizen leaders there to greet Director Peters and myself when we were there and they were learning about social skills and did quite well at introducing us to each class as we went through the day.

Broadview Thompson.

has something they call 1-2-10 I'm not quite sure who they stole it from but I think it's being picked up across the district and that would be if a teacher has a concern about a certain student.

Sometimes those might end up being a concern that you share with another colleague and now for Broadview Thompson it's oh I will make that student a focus of my interest and I will choose that one student and I will meet with them for two minutes every day for the next 10 days just to find out something about the student and what they like and what they appreciate and what their strengths are that they bring to the school.

And then today at Cascadia Elementary I saw virtually every classroom had some manifestation of that where students had a picture of themselves and then they had described something about who they were, what their strengths were and how they could celebrate that in their classroom.

And that's really back to our presentation earlier today around indigenous people's day.

The highly technical education term is identity safety.

Is it okay for me to come to school and be who I am and be a good student and be welcomed and have a sense of belonging in school?

And so we are seeing more and more ways that schools are trying to bridge that gap and truly make all of our students feel welcome.

Moving to good news, the Northwest region NAACP recognized the Garfield football team for their stance on racial discrimination and the team met recently with Terrence Roberts, one of the nine students that integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. Middle College has a meeting coming up I believe that it's on the 20th.

Newly appointed principal Jennifer Knisley is working with staff and students to expand learning opportunities.

They just went to an ALE alternative learning experience statewide meeting.

to make sure that they know what all of the requirements are so as they start to build the program and build on what we've had in the past that we make sure that we do that properly.

Mayor Murray announced on Wednesday that Let's Go Bike and Ped, a bike walk safety program will be implemented districtwide for all third through fifth grade students.

It's a three-week program.

to help students navigate in their neighborhoods and Cascade Bicycle Club is helping by schlepping bicycles around and coordinating the equipment.

So one of those, I guess it's not technically a meta moment but one of my senior moments I guess is as a student at Broadview, not Broadview Thompson but Broadview elementary school we had Elmer the safety elephant so I cringe to think about it in today's terms but they brought this little African elephant in a cage like whatever and took them to each school and then we each got a pencil that had six rules on it.

and I can still remember about three of them.

Look left and right before you cross the street, walk on the left facing traffic, use the crosswalk, etc.

So in a much more politically correct way we are continuing the tradition and making sure that our students can navigate city traffic.

El Centro de la Rosa had a gala event fundraiser recently.

We had many from the district attending.

I believe Director Patu was there representing us along with Bernardo Ruiz.

Restorative justice.

So I have to read this one.

There's new news to me.

Pat Sander and Aaron Romanek went to hear the New Zealand delegation's restorative justice and law enforcement conversation hosted by the city last Friday.

Prior to the presentation, Dan Satterberg announced that his office applied restorative practices in a pilot program with a Seattle Public School student who is facing two years in juvenile detention for first-degree robbery.

A teacher at Interagency Academy, Marcus Harnden, who knew the offender and the victim, approached King County Prosecutor's Office requesting that this case be considered for use with the Peacemaking Circles program and that he would serve as a mentor to the offender.

In the end over 100 hours were spent in this process and a sentencing recommendation was agreed upon.

As a result of this process the team will serve 12 months probation, sit as a member of the peacemaking circles coordinating team and participate in circles of the next year.

So a nice example of the work that is growing slowly as we try to figure out alternatives to suspensions.

And a fundraiser event for Fair Start one of our partnerships with interagency school.

They teach culinary workplace life skill.

We've had them here before the board before.

On Sunday October 9th they had a fundraising event that featured our students and showcased success stories for the interagency partnership.

Deep Dive 3 federally funded race to the top project has helped us with the Somali family safety task force.

One of our partnerships committed to engaging families in their child's educational success along with Seattle Public Schools and the Seattle Public Library.

We've been doing parent training workshops over a 10 week program.

Our singer and rapper Macklemore visited the recovery school, a school for students committed to recovery and there is an MTV highlighted video featuring his visit to the school.

Richard Sherman and the NFL play 60, United Way of King County visited Dearborn Park International Elementary School to encourage students to stay healthy by eating right.

I guess we had Hawks wide receiver Marcus Lucas and defensive end Tony McDaniel played with the students in the gym and encouraged students to read more and set personal goals.

So we've got a growing number of partners that help us encourage students in their work.

And we've heard from our physical education work many times before the board and our program and our personnel have been recognized nationally.

We recently tallied the external investments made to support equitable access to physical education in Seattle Public Schools.

Since 2008 Lori Dunn our PE manager has brought in just under $4 million to support the PE program.

And getting close to the end here, city of Seattle partnerships, the city summit I believe will have their last meeting next Tuesday.

They've got 18 recommendations, they are narrowing them down, they are starting to write the final report and as I mentioned the mayor has already put some money in from the budget that he is recommending.

We also met recently with Seattle Housing Authority and they are coordinating with us and their 6,000 students parents around an attendance campaign and finding some housing for homeless students in regard to Bailey Gatzert.

And in the news has been the homeless encampments that the city council is considering which has been in the news not just here in Seattle but in Pierce County and in Portland.

So the city council is trying to navigate constitutional rights for homeless and trying to protect public safety.

We had an issue at Lowell just before school started where we had a homeless encampment Kind of, I guess it was a city easement but adjacent to the play area there.

So they've been working, several city councilmen have been working closely with our legal department and coordinating with us and they've made some modifications.

So I don't know that they're quite done yet but we're encouraged by the fact that we're moving in the right direction and that schools should be exempted from that work.

And I have two more things, one that I forgot that I have here somewhere.

School directors have these reflectorized decals, whatever they are, I don't know what you call those, but for students.

Okay, zipper pulls.

Alright, in the glow in the dark.

So as we get closer to dark hours occurring about the time that some of our students will be headed home those will be made available and I think that is through the school district and through the city.

Thank you for that.

And then the executive committee for the board recently changed our procedures with regard to public comment to allow for the recognition of elected officials and so at this time I'd like to recognize Claudia Kaufman a legislator and allow two minutes of commentary with regard to one of the upcoming action items on the agenda.

Thank you very much.

For the record I'm Claudia Kaufman.

I grew up in Seattle.

I'm a member of the Nez Perce tribe.

Also a product of the Seattle school district.

Go Eagles I'm from Cleveland.

But I'm here tonight to talk to you.

You know as a federally recognized Indian tribe, Nez Perce Indian tribe I would never come to you and ask you to recognize my treaty rights.

It is important that federal Indian history be accurate in our system and that I urge you to review the documents that have been sent to you by the local federally recognized Indian tribes regarding resolution 17-1.

I ask that you please utilize your resources, your precious time and energy on items in which to promote student success.

when I was in the state legislature I was the one who sponsored the bill who did the research, the yearlong research on the achievement gap on all communities of color.

And from that came all of these workgroups, studies, recommendations and additional laws that have come forward that address the achievement gap which should be the focus.

And what you spoke of earlier, the opportunity gap for all children, not just one group, not just the other, for all children.

I have a long history of supporting education as a mother, as a grandmother, as a foster parent.

Education is primary in our household.

And I encourage you to address real-world problems and challenges that face our students, our communities of color, our Native American students.

I appreciate the opportunity.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

We also have Cecilia Hansen here, tribal chairman for Duwamish and would invite her to also give two minutes of testimony with regard to upcoming agenda items.

I thought I was coming on later but I'm delighted to be able to speak and so anyway.

I want to tell you that the Duwamish tribe thanks you for your resolution of acknowledgement of the rightful status for the Duwamish tribe.

I just want you to remember if you will, federal treaties by the U.S. government are valid documents Cornelia Treaty signed up by our chief, Sealth, and sub-chiefs was not implemented as promised for our people.

For our people, it is sad.

Historical fact is they named a city after our chief, and then why haven't the city leaders since treaty era time advocated for the Duwamish nation on their rightful status.

I'm not complaining but it seems to me that there seems to be a right and there is a wrong.

Finally you have planted a seed of righteousness for the city of Seattle and I want to thank you all.

And I'm just, this is the week of indigenous and so this is really wonderful that this is happening during this week.

As you know we don't celebrate that one other holiday but we do celebrate and it is the week of indigenous and it's a wow for everybody for all Indian people in the United States and even the city of Seattle.

Thank you.

Thank you.

That concludes Superintendent Comins.

Again I would like to welcome Casey Kono from Chief Sealth High School.

Casey excels academically at Chief Sealth International High School while being very involved in the school community.

She is a senior ASB spirit commissioner, a link crew leader, a cheerleader, a gymnast, a founding leader of Sealth's flag squad and a former member of the school's orchestra.

I will now turn it over to Ms. Kono for her remarks.

Okay thank you so much first of all school board and Superintendent Nyland for having me today.

When I was asked to come here I was shocked honestly but it's great to be able to speak in front of a room of people like this.

We take pride of course in self that some of the things I wanted to bring up today was some of the programs that we are offering currently itself.

We are offering honors classes, mixed honors classes as well for freshmen and sophomores and of course we are very proud to be offering the international baccalaureate program for our juniors and seniors to be testing.

for college credit.

We are also offering multiple languages at our school currently as in Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and Japanese.

We also have two programs that we are very proud of which is the Academy of Business and Finance and the Academy of Hospitality which provides students with trips to New York to get experience in new cities as well as paid internships over the summer which goes really well on college resumes.

We also have our national honor society which has been stepping up lately and we have a huge club and they take pride in community service hours and doing lots of things for our school as well.

I also have a peer here sitting in the front row here to talk about the Wajin conference which our school has the opportunity to host and that's going to be very interesting to hear from her as well.

So thank you for having me here today and I'm very excited to take all these things back to my school.

Thank you very much Casey and welcome.

We really appreciate your comment being here and being part of the board.

Now we are going to reach the consent portion of tonight's agenda.

Do I have a motion for the consent agenda?

I move approval of the consent agenda.

Second the motion.

All those in favor?

Those opposed?

Okay the consent agenda has passed.

And now we are coming to our public testimony and 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 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.

Ms. Ritchie will read off the testimony speakers.

I would also like to note that due to an inadvertent error in the application of a board procedure 1430 regarding audience participation an individual was appropriately bumped from the public testimony list to the waitlist.

To remedy the situation we will be taking testimony from 26 speakers at tonight's meeting.

Ms. Ritchie.

Our first three speakers will be Clarissa Perez, Kate Van Heusen, Chris Jackins.

Hi my name is Clarissa Perez and I am a sophomore at Chief Sealth International High School.

Today I am here to tell you a bit about how much being at Chief Sealth has helped me prosper as a young teenager trying to make a difference in their community.

I went to private school from kindergarten through eighth grade and I really didn't know what to expect when starting public school last year.

I started at Chief Sealth in the fall of 2015. At first I felt alone at the school because I only knew one person but I always tried to keep a smile on my face.

From there I found it easy to make friends and feel welcome.

I would like to emphasize how awesome the teachers are at Chief Sealth and how amazing my counselor is.

They always give me a smile, a hug or whatever I need to get through the day.

You might think that someone made me say this but I genuinely mean it.

I would find it hard to navigate high school if the staff itself wasn't as good as it is right now.

So just a quick shout out to my awesome teachers Ms. Griffin, Ms. Whited, Ms. Hickman, Mr. Zeichner, Mr. Steed, Ms. Ostad, Mr. Dursey, Mr. Humphrey, Ms. Nielsen, Ms. Marsh, Ms. Shepard and my counselor Mr. Rosen and the many other teachers and staff who have impacted me in a positive way.

At Chief Sealth International High School I have also discovered my love for the environment through being part of the green team and language arts when we studied the Duwamish River and the UN sustainable development goals and in my global leadership class.

A project our green team tackled last year was to try and get refillable water bottle stations at our school.

You may remember I was one of the students who spoke at the school board last winter for that.

We are hopeful that our new filling stations will be installed soon.

Many more opportunities have come from attending Chief Sealth.

I am a representative for the Seattle Public Schools with sustainability ambassadors, a local nonprofit.

I am also the on-site student coordinator for the Washington Global Issues Network or WAGEN conference that our school will host in March of 2017. The Wajin Conference is a two-day event designed to unite youth from all over Washington and other states to discuss the global issues we are facing on our planet.

Superintendent Nyland joined our school for the first Wajin Conference in 2015. We hope he along with any school board directors can join us again this year.

We will make sure to send you an invitation.

Thank you for listening to how much I like Chief Sealth International High School.

Have a good evening.

Thank you.

Hi I am Kate Veenhuizen and I will be giving my speaking spot to a fellow student Lily Murphy.

Thanks Kate.

Hello my name is Lily Murphy and I am a junior at West Seattle High School and a student-athlete.

I would like to start by thanking the board for this opportunity to share our concerns with them.

I am here to ask for a change to the district transportation plan and I speak on behalf of all high school student-athletes and parents who are concerned about maintaining academic priorities.

The change in bell times was supposed to benefit us but we are having trouble seeing the benefits when we have to miss more than two classes per day multiple times a week because the transportation plan was not taken into consideration when the school day shifted.

As student-athletes we have to get out of school at 1245 in order to leave at 1 o'clock for an event that does not start until 4 PM or later due to the district's transportation plan.

We are missing part of fourth period, lunch and all of fifth and sixth period and then we go and sit at a field or find a place outside of the school we are dropped at to wait for a few hours before our competition.

This is too much class time to be missing on a regular basis.

When having two or three games a week it is very hard to make up so much work and understand what is going on in class and it is also very difficult for our teachers.

Up until recently schools could choose to book a charter bus at a more appropriate time but at a cost of about three times what we were initially paying.

Most schools cannot afford this option.

This past week the schools were told that the district would now pay for a charter bus so the teams could leave at a more appropriate time.

This has not been put in writing and because the district does not have an exclusive contract with the charter company there are no guarantees that even those buses will be available.

Teams have already missed events due to the short-term band-aid for the problem.

We are asking the school board to immediately allow schools to book outside transportation vendors as we did up until two years ago or to have the district lease or buy nine seat passenger vans for the high schools to use.

Both of these options would provide flexibility for the schools and cost less than the charter buses.

Thank you for your time and we hope that you will consider our requests.

Thank you.

My name is Chris Jackins Box 84063 Seattle 98124. On the approval of the settlement with the Seattle Education Association for points number one as part of the settlement of a labor grievance the district would pay a portion of money as back pay to substitutes.

Number two the settlement violated school board policy 6220. because it was more than $250,000 but was not approved by the board.

Number three, it would be better to start the negotiations fresh again even though the district report states that there is a risk of the district not prevailing on their underlying grievance.

Number four, what if the reality is that the agreement snookered the substitutes out of money that they deserve?

Right now the board doesn't know.

Go back and find out.

Please vote no on this settlement.

On the resolution for school board support of federal recognition of the Duwamish nation.

Four points.

Number one, I very much support the resolution.

My thanks to Director Pinkham for bringing it forward.

The city of Seattle and the Seattle school district are named after a Duwamish chief.

Number two, the Duwamish Nation should join other Indian tribes that have received federal recognition.

Number three, the public schools have a long connection with the Duwamish Nation.

The first superintendent of schools of King County transcribed and translated Chief Sealth's famous 1854 speech to territorial Governor Isaac Stevens.

Number four, I have first-hand positive experience with the Duwamish helping on education issues.

I also have a copy of a petition with over 150 names asking for the support of federal tribal recognition of the Duwamish tribe which I will hand into you.

Please vote yes on this resolution.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

If Andrea Bustos Sanchez is in the room, could you please go to the back and meet your interpreter, please?

Thank you.

For the next three speakers, we have Charles Davis, Vicky Pinkham, and John Cerqui, or Cruz.

Good afternoon.

The Duwamish tribe has been recognized, then unrecognized by the federal government.

That shows that the issue of the tribe's rights and benefits is very political.

But more than that, recognition of the tribe's treaty rights and benefits concerns justice, justice for the people who originally lived on and considered their own, the land on which many, perhaps all, of this district's schools are built.

Justice is more important than politics.

Therefore, I'm asking you to support justice for the Duwamish tribe.

I've been fortunate at several times in my fairly long life, I'm 80 years old, to have spent time in Indian country and to get to know many Indian people and a little about their traditions and beliefs.

These are important.

We can learn from them.

We should know more about them.

We should respect them.

It is an understatement to say that our government has treated America's native people badly.

In 1855, the Duwamish and other tribes were forced to sign the Treaty of Point Elliot, ceding most of the land around here to the federal government, which opened it up to homesteading by non-Indians.

As with most such treaties, our government broke it repeatedly.

Restoring treaty rights and benefits will not compensate for what the Duwamish people have suffered.

But it is an important step.

Your support for this resolution will help the Duwamish cause and send an important message about the importance of justice.

Please support the resolution.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I want to speak in support of this resolution for the Duwamish.

I am the Secretary of the Duwamish Tribal Services Board of Directors.

I've spent 30 years with the United States Department of State in Washington, D.C., and I know well treaties.

I've traveled all over the world.

In this hemisphere, I've been to Machu Picchu, in the Andes of Peru, Teotihuacan, the pyramids of Mexico, and also we have the Duwamish Longhouse in Seattle.

At one time there were 17 villages with 93 longhouses.

Chief Seattle signed the treaty.

The Senate of the United States ratified that treaty and the tribe is federally recognized.

But we have a Lee Fleming who is a branch chief in the Department of Interior who unrecognized the tribe after Mike Anderson had said the tribe was eligible for benefits and services.

Today, 118 boxes of artifacts found in this city have been taken out of this city by another group.

Today the Duwamish, our descendants, have a great history and the Longhouse of Seattle is linked to that history.

When school children come to the Longhouse they see artifacts of Chief Seattle.

They learn how the chief spoke and his people spoke in the Lusitzi language.

And they listen to storytellers tell tales like the Battle of the North Wind and the South Wind.

They learn to respect nature.

They learn how to make fry bread and what the native people ate at one time.

They learn how to weave baskets and other clothing.

They learn how the Raven dugout canoe goes on an annual journey up and down the waterways.

They also participate in the fun of ceremonial dances and drumming events.

The spirit of the Duwamish people is alive and it is alive by genealogical descent.

It's not just necessarily recognition and non-recognition.

The tribe is recognized.

The only problem we are having is trying to get benefits and services out of the interior department for the tribe.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Carrie Brown Rooster.

Philip Chuang.

Laura Riley.

Hello, my name is Kerry Brown Wooster and I'm a proud parent of a kindergartner and second grader at John Rogers Elementary.

I want to first thank the board, especially Director Pinkham for citing their concerns about opening Cedar Park as an attendance area school at last month's school board meeting.

There are many people here tonight who will testify about the racial divide the boundaries will create and the inequity of this decision far more eloquently than myself.

I am here to ask you to put a pause to the opening of Cedar Park and truly deal with the capacity issues in the Northeast.

With over 800 elementary school children being displaced from their communities, many represented here tonight, we need to make sure that these boundary changes are necessary.

Opening Cedar Park is merely putting a Band-Aid on a bleeding artery and so many families will be affected while you are doing it.

We were told that throughout the community boundary meetings that long-term capacity projections were being taken into consideration.

With Cedar Park opening at capacity next year, along with John Rogers at capacity, and Olympic Hills being filled with children from other schools, where do you intend to put the children from the 1,000 new family units being built in the next few years within the Cedar Park, John Rogers, and Olympic Hills boundaries?

John Rogers desperately needs a new building.

I testified on the condition of the building last year myself.

Briefly, the school is from the 1950s, the foundations are sagging, exposed wiring runs along all the corridors, rain frequently runs on those exposed wires, the plumbing cannot always be repaired because it's too old, and the repairs for the buildings are in the millions of dollars.

We love our small school.

The teachers and staff there are wonderful.

If we could keep it small we would.

But the only way you will ultimately solve the capacity issue is to rebuild John Rogers.

I know that members of the Seattle delegation are meeting with SPS capital staff on November 1st.

I plead with you, the school board, to ask for John Rogers to receive a distressed schools grant from the state legislator.

A distressed schools grant would help with funds to enable you to rebuild John Rogers.

By pausing the opening of Cedar Park as an attendance school area you can reevaluate what is actually needed in the Northeast without displacing so many children and disrupting their education and truly get it right for today and the future.

Thank you.

Thank you.

So next are Phillip Chung, Laura Riley and Lisa Marsumoto.

Hello thank you for the opportunity to speak today.

My name is Phillip Chung and I am a parent of two kids at Olympic Hills Elementary.

I am here today to talk about advocacy for the Cedar Park Elementary School.

I was one of the parents who participated in the Cedar Park racial equity analysis meetings over the summer.

First I want to thank Ashley Davies from the boundary team and Abraham Rodriguez Hernandez from the race and equity team from the district for coordinating and leading us through the race and equity toolkit.

We were able to look at a lot of new data that highlights the challenges with opening Cedar Park as an attendance area school.

At the conclusion of our meetings I've done some more analysis and would like to share them with you.

To get straight to the point, the new proposed boundaries do not address my concerns that Cedar Park will be opened, that Cedar Park will be opened as an economically and racially segregated school.

The proposed boundaries actually increase the number of underserved students attending Cedar Park.

I am not alone in this assessment.

Included in my materials is a letter from the North District Council highlighting similar concerns around equity, segregation, and diversity.

You will be hearing a lot of concerns from parents across the district on different issues associated with the boundaries but I would like you to especially consider the equity impacts to Cedar Park.

You will see in my materials maps with census data on median household income for the Cedar Park Olympic Hills and John Rogers area.

The west boundary for Cedar Park that the district chose overlaps with an existing economic divide in the community.

The graphs show the increase in underserved FRL and ELL students that Cedar Park will have with the proposed boundary.

This is not the outcome I was hoping for.

I would like the school district to think about different options for Cedar Park.

When evaluating these options I would like the district to incorporate socioeconomic and racial equity data so that boundaries are drawn to account for the community's demographic needs.

The race and equity team that met over the summer was a good start but the activity needs to be further developed.

I especially would like the school board to prioritize race and equity analysis in more decisions.

The goal of district policy 0030 is to close the opportunity gap and provide a quality education for all students.

Please show that this is important to you and reevaluate the Cedar Park boundaries.

Thank you.

Thank you.

My name is Laura Riley and I have a second grader at Sacajawea Elementary and I will have an ingoing kindergartner next year.

My family is impacted by these boundary changes and I am here today to speak on both behalf of those that are impacted at Sacajawea Elementary as well as those who are feeling the indirect impacts and are concerned about what the boundary changes will do to our school and our students.

One of our concerns is that the numbers that have been shared regarding the capacity were not accurate for Sacagawea.

This leads us to questions about other numbers and data that the board is using to make all of these decisions.

The amount of disruption that is being caused and not actually solving overcrowding problems doesn't make sense.

59 of our most diverse students will be moved to Olympic Hills while 98 students will replace them from Olympic View putting us further over capacity.

There is also information that suggests growth around Cedar Park in the next few years will have that school over capacity meaning all of the shifting will be for nothing.

We request that Seattle Public Schools confirm and verify both capacity and enrollment figures and provide additional transparency on the data used to inform the grandfathering and boundary change recommendations.

We also request that the school board allow the grandfathering of current students in all grades and allow the capacity and enrollment shifts to necessary fill other schools to happen gradually over time.

Another large concern for Sacajawea and other schools here today is the fact that of the 59 students that will be moved 60% are minorities.

Sacajawea prides itself on the variety of backgrounds, cultures and ethnicities it has.

We should not be creating additional barriers for those children who are already potentially more at risk.

We request that the district reexamine these boundary changes with respect to maintaining and enhancing the diversity in Sacajawea and other school communities by postponing these changes by at least 12 months.

To summarize, please allow grandfathering.

The disruption is too much.

Pause the implementation making sure to reevaluate the data, reexamine how these changes impact diversity at all schools.

provide more robust community engagement and consider alternatives for Cedar Park including making that an option school.

Thank you.

Thank you.

After Ms. Marcimoto we will have Vicki Pinkham, Erin Napton and Kathleen Zaggar.

My name is Lisa Matsumoto.

I am a parent of a fourth grader at John Rogers Elementary and I'm here to address the proposed boundary changes for 2017. I'm able to testify this evening because I had access to the process for giving testimony through your website.

I'm an English speaker and I have regular access to the Internet and my employer allowed me the flexibility to rearrange my work schedule to be here.

My family is a two-parent household in which my husband was able to stay home with our two children so that I may be here.

And I have access to a car that allowed me to drive to the John Stanford Center.

While I have been afforded many privileges that have allowed me to be here this evening, I live in a community where many of my neighbors do not share these privileges.

The community has been segregated throughout this process by the way we can access the information, participate in public forums, and opportunities we have to make our voices heard.

As a community we are faced with a very real capacity crisis across our region and we need a long-term solution.

However as responsible citizens committed to equity we have to ensure that the solutions to our capacity problems do not create greater injustices.

Next year many of the children leaving my daughter's school will be the children of color, those who are English language learners and those who qualify for free or reduced lunch.

Whether intended or not these capacity decisions segregate the community.

My daughter is biracial and currently goes to school each day with children from a variety of ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds.

She plays and learns alongside of children of differing abilities and family dynamics.

Her school is a reflection of our community and it reflects her.

How do I honestly explain to my daughter that John Rogers will be a better school with her friends gone?

How do I explain that her friends with browner skin who speak two languages who need help from the school food drive must leave because of capacity?

How do I explain the segregation?

How do I tell my daughter that part of who she is no longer belongs at John Rogers?

Thank you.

Thank you.

I'd like to concede my time to my daughter Joanne.

In regards to the Duwamish resolution and the American Indian and Alaskan Native students of Seattle Public Schools I am in full support of this resolution.

Additionally I would like to see true American Indian history be taught at every level in the schools.

It is with honor and respect that we acknowledge the first people of this region.

It is not our intention to disrespect any of the tribes in Washington state.

This resolution and acknowledgement is long overdue.

Thank you to my father for writing and supporting this resolution.

Our next step is to ensure that the Duwamish people regain the federal recognition.

At this time I would like to call Cecilia Hanson and honor her with this.

She already spoke.

Thank you.

Hello my name is Erin Apton.

I'm here about the growth boundary proposal.

I'm a parent at Viewlands Elementary which is our assigned school.

Should the recommendations be approved our third grader will be grandfathered but our kindergarten will be moved to Olympic View.

If this disruption were just limited to my family we would fight it alone.

The fortunate thing is that we are not alone.

At Viewlands we are 120 kids directly affected by this proposal.

We are the entire school of 400 affected as we see families separated and friends moved.

These kids and families are more than numbers.

We are third graders giving kindergarteners high fives.

We are parents sharing the trials and tribulations of raising kids.

We are the teachers and staff who make sure every student is known.

We are the Viewlands elementary school community.

For Viewlands an estimated 120 kids will be impacted.

The new boundary would bring in around 40 students from other schools resulting in a disruption of 160 students in order to reduce enrollment by about 40 students.

Please amend the proposal to include grandfathering.

We want to keep Viewlands intact.

Grandfather all current students in area 117 and keep all siblings at Viewlands.

Equity, please use the Seattle Public School racial equity analysis tool at our school to identify parts of our community who may be underrepresented and underserved.

Provide appropriate mitigation like limited transportation.

Please notify all families affected by the exclusion.

Families currently do not know this is happening and do not understand the implications for siblings or transportation.

Stability, please provide more time to transition families.

Viewlands reopened five years ago after being closed for four years.

In those five years the Viewlands community has gained momentum as a school community.

People have worked hard building relationships and partnerships that provide the continuity students need to do their best learning.

Give them the stability they need to stay and build relationships, continue to build relationships with students, staff, families, and childcare that create the safe environment they need to learn.

The boundary change with no grandfathering is too much too fast.

We look forward to working with you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

After Ms. Zager we will have Ian Coppa, Rebecca Brito and Douglas Doan.

Hi I am Kathleen Zagers.

I am an Olympic view parent.

I am here on behalf of our school and I am really proud of our school.

We work hard and pride ourselves on being a model of family engagement for a diverse urban school.

But we are not just a school, we are a community.

We are a complex network of resources and relationships that have developed over time to support our students and to help every one of them grow.

And we do it without a ton of money.

The current growth boundary proposal has Olympic View scheduled to lose one half of its students to other schools.

Upon hearing this news our community decided to host a meeting for parents to explain the changes and provide a time and space to create feedback for the district.

Five days later and just two and a half weeks into a new school year we were able to rally 100 parents to show up who had major concerns about this plan.

You have a picture of our meeting I submitted it.

It's just to let you know that that's who showed up for our meeting and we want to take an extra minute to thank the district staff who was also able to attend.

But I stand here today not just as Kathleen Zagers I stand here on behalf of all of my Olympic view families and those parents who can't be here today.

We need grandfathering.

50% is too much change too fast.

These changes aren't just fast, they disproportionately impact our FRL and ELL populations.

Our community needs our resources but they need them to improve outcomes for students not just help them weather another in a long line of transitions.

We've had early start times, less busing, early releases once a week.

We stand here not just as Olympic View but we stand with our neighbor schools to ask for a pause and a reevaluation of the growth boundaries using current data not data from 2012. Thank you.

Good evening.

Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to speak.

My name is Ian Coppa and I am the father of two children who would be impacted by the boundary proposal.

My children would transition from Viewlands to Olympic View.

So I am asking you to reconsider or consider amending the proposed boundary.

While I have a lot of issues with the boundary line proposals in a limited amount of time the one I want to focus on is safety.

For those of us who live west of Aurora our children would have to cross two major roadways.

For those of you who are familiar with Aurora they would have to cross five lanes of traffic with crosswalks that are spread out.

They would have to deal with known human trafficking and drug abuse and dealing.

Additionally I want my children to be able to bike and walk to school.

That is a value that is important to me and my understanding is that the priority of the new boundary stresses that.

The new boundary line proposal would make that unrealistic.

There are no bike paths.

There are no greenways.

There are hardly any sidewalks to get to Olympic views from that side of Aurora.

Additionally the main arterial to get to school 92nd or to get to Viewlands 92nd will see an increase in cars in the years to come with the opening of light rail in 2021 and the rezoning for the Aurora-Licton Springs urban village.

Given all these factors I ask you to please reconsider the existing boundary.

Make it safer for our kids to get to school.

Thank you.

Hi my name is Rebecca Brito I am a parent at John Rogers and Jane Addams.

Today I will be submitting two documents for you.

One you have received via email from me already about the my experience on the Cedar Park race and equity team.

I sent it sometime around midnight last night but I have hard copies for you.

I wanted you to know that as you've heard tonight the impacts of the boundary changes predominantly affect and disproportionately affect families of color, English language learners and low-income families across the region.

This summer I spent some time in Little Brook which is a neighborhood in the slice the part that Olympic Hills is hoping to retain so I had the opportunity to get to know some of those families.

A lot of families did not know about the changes.

They believed that they were still going to be moving with some of their favorite teachers to their new school building that was customized for that community specifically in mind.

So in my experience we did review plenty of scenarios but in those scenarios we did not actually as a group come to a consensus among parents, district employees and teachers that participated.

We did discuss segregation in the Northeast and how that is being implemented with the boundary changes.

We discussed how temporarily we right size Cedar Park.

We discussed the fleeting nature of the boundary changes with the development that's taking place.

We discussed the lack of diversity at HCC with the possible solution at Cedar Park.

We discussed the challenges of option school enrollment and how it disproportionately favors Caucasian families and families with access to school systems and how that could be improved.

I also have a letter for you signed by no less than 57 members of the North Seattle community representing at least 16 schools as last count.

addressing the boundary changes and the request for a pause.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Good evening my name is Douglas Delwin I am a proud parent of a first grader and hopefully a future kindergartner at Green Lake Elementary School.

Which has two areas, areas 41 and 44 which will be going to Wedgwood and Bryant respectively.

Currently or next year Bryant will have an over-enrollment of 162 students and Wedgwood will have an over-enrollment of 46. And that is without adding these 71 plus students that will go into there as part of this change.

Does it make sense or is it fair to send students from one over-enrolled school to another?

But my purpose in speaking here is not to complain about a problem but to promote an idea and a solution to help alleviate the over-enrollment at Green Lake Elementary and Northeast elementary schools in general.

BF Day which is adjacent to Green Lake area attendance has capacity.

97 students approximately according to the records here.

John Stanford and McDonald which are two option schools within the Green Lake area of attendance, basically within that area of attendance.

So what happens if John Stanford's GeoZone were to become part of BF Day's GeoZone?

Basically students south of 50th and east of UW would attend BF Day instead of Green Lake if they decide not to enroll in John Stanford or they drop out of the immersion program.

I have prepared a marked up attendance map and submitted it as an exhibit, hopefully you have it in front of you, that would show how this change would look.

And I have friends at John Stanford GeoZone who when this original area was proposed were perplexed that it was attached to Green Lake rather than BF Day which is much closer where the kids can ride to school, through the Berkman trail, they can drive on their way downtown.

And I've also reached out to the BFDA community which is hungry for enrollment, increasing their enrollment and they are excited about this idea.

I'm sure Wedgwood and Brian would also enjoy not having their capacity increased.

This would be a win for BF Day, a win for John Sanford, a win for Green Lake, a win for Bryant and a win for Wedgwood.

So before you move and disrupt families in 41 and 44 I urge you to look at this new change area that will solve multiple problems.

Thank you very much for your time.

Thank you.

Amy Hansen, Tama Weinberg and Thomas Knapp.

Douglas is taller than I am.

Good evening.

I am Amy Hansen and I am also a parent of Green Lake Elementary students a current first and fourth grader that are assigned to the school.

I reside in attendance area 44 designated to become Wedgwood and I ask that the board grandfather all existing families not just students at Green Lake and Eckstein now and to right size the Green Lake and Eckstein attendance areas with current enrollment data before implementing the changes that are being proposed for the reasons so eloquently stated by Douglas.

I recognize that the district board and parent community are all looking for solutions but as alluded to earlier by district staff the proposals currently before the board are significant changes that will promote enormous disruption.

It affects 860 students in 21 elementary and 24 middle school attendance areas in this district.

Current data no longer support many of the attendance area changes and can only somewhat mitigate our overenrollment if the long-standing practice of grandfathering is abandoned for the first time and restricted or restrictively and unevenly retained.

Specifically I would like to ask the board to grandfather families not just existing students at Green Lake for factors that are unique to Green Lake.

Specifically this will be the third attendance area change in seven years.

In 2009 attendance areas changes were made when McDonald's was reopened and the district redo our border to accommodate that opening and to include the very two areas on the east that are being drawn out now.

This was reacted to by using a multi-age program.

In 2014 again our borders were changed and the border was expanded from the top of Green Lake down to Lake Union and now 12 current fourth graders will be displaced next year who have attended Green Lake since kindergarten and forced to change schools again next year for middle school.

Thank you.

Please keep our current students at Green Lake.

Thank you.

Hi my name is Tam O'Weinberg.

I'm a parent of two kids at Kimball elementary in Beacon Hill.

I'm also the vice president of its PTSA.

I'm here to urge you to vote yes on the amendment being introduced tonight to retain Kimball area children in the Mercer middle school feeder pattern.

We've been working long and hard with SPS staff since 2013 and our district representative on this issue.

Retaining Kimball area kids in the Mercer middle school feeder pattern is the right thing to do for Kimball kids and for the district.

It's right for walkability, safety and neighborhood equity.

It's right for walkability because nearly all Kimball area kids are in the walk zone for Mercer middle school.

None are in the walk zone for Washington middle school where the growth boundaries passed in 2013 would have our children go.

It's right for safety.

The federal state and local governments invested nearly a million dollars in a safe route to school path that takes children by walking or bike from our North Beacon Hill neighborhood to Mercer.

We can't use that if our kids don't go there.

It's also right for safety because if this amendment fails our kids will have to take two city buses or a bus and a length light rail and then walk up to the central district to Washington Middle School instead of walking or biking a couple of blocks to Mercer.

It's also right because for neighborhood equity we live in a very diverse neighborhood and this is our middle school that we have invested in for a very long time.

It has our support services right there that are linguistically and culturally appropriate.

We have El Centro, De La Raza and Refugee Women's Alliance there.

We have Jefferson Community Center.

We have a lot of linguistically and culturally appropriate services right there.

Those services don't exist for our cultures and our languages in Washington.

So again I urge you to vote yes on the amendment to retain Kimball area kids in Mercer Middle School.

It's right for our kids and it's right for our district.

Thank you for working with us for the last three years on this.

Thank you.

Hello my name is Tom Napton and I'm a parent of two daughters at Viewlands Elementary.

And I wanted to share with you how this will affect my family.

The boundary changes I've spoken with a lot of other parents and they have similar stories but I figured the best way to share this with you is to tell you how it's going to affect my family.

So currently if the district's proposal is approved my daughters will attend two different elementary schools.

My kindergartner will go to Olympic View and my third grader will attend Viewlands Elementary.

And what this will do, this will make it nearly impossible for our family to get both daughters to school on time.

We can't be in two places at once.

One daughter will get bus, the other won't have transportation.

So if we wait at the bus stop with one of my daughters, we're not going to be able to get my other daughter to the other school.

So it's going to be impossible.

The only option I see for our family is to alternate days in which we decide which daughter is tardy to school.

I'm also a teacher in Seattle Public Schools and I know how damaging excessive tardies can be to student learning.

But we have no alternative in this case.

We also have to split our time between volunteering at our daughter's two schools.

Currently we spend a lot of time, my wife volunteers regularly at my daughter's school but we'll have to split between the two schools and I'm not really sure how that's going to work out.

We'll have to split our time, we'll have to split our volunteer, sorry our money, we'll have to donate to two PTSA's.

This will be really tough on our family and many others.

The other thing, my daughters are very close and have built strong connections with Viewlands and most of the staff know my youngest daughter because she's been around there for years with my older daughter.

She even knows the school Bitesong and all this community is going to be torn away from her when she's forced to move to Olympic View along with you know part of our sisterly bond.

What I ask of you is to please reexamine these shifts and do what's best for the students and also consider grandfathering in all students and phasing this in starting with kindergarten over time.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Jennifer Nichols, Kimberly Peterson and Eda Mack.

Hi my name is Jenny Nichols and I have a fourth grader and a first grader at Viewlands Elementary.

We live on the western boundary of Area 117 which would rezone us into Olympic View.

Viewlands is less than a mile from our home.

Olympic View is two miles away and is by no definition in our neighborhood.

Between us and Olympic View is Aurora, North Seattle Community College, I-5 and the Northgate Park and Ride.

Asking families to travel across Highway 99 and I-5 is a huge safety liability especially for those who don't have a car and walk or bike.

With limited grandfathering families with split siblings like me are faced with having kids in two different schools three miles apart with the same bell time and only one getting a bus.

I ask that you draw the western boundary of area 117 at Aurora.

Area 128 to the north could be reduced to offset the change.

This would both provide relief for the area 117 families west of Aurora and lessen the impact of grandfathering families east of Aurora.

As for grandfathering I ask that you consider that it is the only just option considering the likely number of families who don't even know this is happening.

I'm very tied to my email but it took a fair amount of digging for me to figure out that we were actually affected by the change.

We are so close to the edge of the area it took several layers of linking and downloading for me to figure out exactly where the lines were.

We can be certain that there are families with language and technology barriers who are entirely unaware they are affected by the boundary changes.

The only just option is to grandfather all students.

In the end this is about physical safety, parity and also community.

Schools need strong communities to thrive.

Communities need continuity to thrive.

You hold our communities in your hands.

Please hold them in your hearts and hold them with care.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Hi my name is Kim Peterson I have daughters at Green Lake Elementary and Eckstein middle school.

I agree very much with all of the issues that parents have brought up about elementary school boundaries but I want to bring your attention to the North Seattle middle school boundary changes for next year.

These need serious review.

Number one The boundaries in the current plan for Robert Eagle Staff will empty Whitman and under enrolled middle school without providing any relief to Hamilton the most overcrowded middle school in North Seattle.

Number two, decisions about HCC middle school pathways must be made in conjunction with boundary decisions.

Otherwise hundreds of students are not being considered in the plans and in the numbers.

Three, there are unnecessary changes.

For example, area 45 the northern half of Green Lake's boundary is being moved from assignment to Eckstein to assignment to Hamilton from a school that has space to a school that is overenrolled.

Please reconsider this.

Although there is a practice of aligning elementary school boundaries to feed to one middle school in Green Lake's case this doesn't make sense.

Our boundary extends from Lake Union all the way up to Maple Leaf.

So, what is logical for the southern section is not what is logical for the northern section.

So, for reasons of geography and capacity please keep area 45 at Eckstein.

If for some reason that doesn't happen at minimum please grandfather the current sixth and seventh grade students at Eckstein from area 45. There is no valid reason to disrupt these students.

Furthermore I am really concerned that across all of these middle school changes the 6th and 7th graders who may be forced to change schools next year may very well be the same students in high school who will once again be forced to move when the boundaries are redrawn with the opening of Lincoln High School.

So I please ask that you make solid plans based on current data and minimize disruptions otherwise I fear we will be right back here doing this again in a couple of years.

Thank you so much for listening and for considering this.

Thank you.

Good evening I'm Eden Mack I'm the legislative chair for the Seattle Council PTSA and a member of the capacity management task force.

First I want to thank you and Dr. Nyland for providing the opportunity for us to work together to find solutions to our building capacity crisis.

Already the task force has provided some recommendations about the boundary changes.

which I think are going to be shared today.

And I will quickly paraphrase a few of them.

First, the task force has recommended that the growth boundaries implementation plan be examined for using the race and equity toolkit.

Second, we voted that in order to properly evaluate the plan we actually need to understand where the vital services and programs like special ed, ELL, HCC, before and after school care, preschool, health clinics and so on where they are.

Our schools are not just classrooms but also programs and services and that space needs to be planned for.

Growth boundaries and capacity management are extremely complicated because every decision has a rippling effect and impacts kids and families.

I was at the school board meeting in 2013 when the board was voting on growth boundaries.

Director Patu will recall that the lights shut off on us because it went so late.

There were 22 amendments proposed including for example the very important preservation of Licton Springs K8 by carving out space in Robert Eagle Staff Middle School building.

Even then it was specifically stated that the feeder schools for Whitman and Eagle Staff would need to change because of that decision.

A lot has changed since 2013 and even then the board knew that the plan they adopted was going to need to be reexamined.

Today what we are hearing is the very same simple message.

The plan created in 2013 doesn't work today four years later.

Already 50% has been amended and the other 50% is who you are hearing from today.

What we are hearing is that it also disproportionately negatively impacts the very students and families that are already in the opportunity gap.

I'm very encouraged that the board and staff will work hard over the next few weeks, months to amend this plan, incorporate all the recent community feedback as well as to ensure that all the critical issues will be addressed like grandfathering for middle school students, assignment pathways, the geozone for Licton Springs and of course reexamining which boundary changes are actually appropriate and necessary now.

Thank you.

Melissa Westbrook, Jennifer Frasman, and Kristen Holmstrom.

Good evening.

I would like to stand in support of the resolution to support the Duwamish Nation.

To the TRI settlement, the name of the employee who did this is Jeff Miller.

We are to believe over two years Mr. Miller created this settlement with no one in senior management and no one in accounting knowing anything about it.

To the growth boundaries main points the creation of Cedar Park with a large ELL and free and reduced population flies in the face of all best practices.

And we are going to bus kids from Cedar Park to Olympic Hills to access the health clinic that was designed for when they were students at Olympic Hills.

As well the most egregious statement in this bar is an assessment of facilities and capital needs for Cedar Park and John Rogers isn't that what you do before you move students around?

You, this does not address the geo-splitting versus grandfathering.

It doesn't do anything pathways for HCC and as we noted feeder patterns for middle school.

Staff is vague on the cost for these changes.

The two attachments to this bar D and E are not there nor is the promised analysis of transportation costs.

to the governance priorities.

I am astonished to find out the district doesn't have any documentation showing where programs are and who is in them.

Some of us have asked for this for many years.

One key sentence, the district will conduct a district comparison by major activities and programs including looking for efficiencies.

I predict that single sentence will start a chain of reasoning to close or massively change programs.

After listening to tonight's testimony I have to smile at smart goal number five.

Quote, by May 31, 2017 through established guidelines, protocols and training Seattle Public Schools will develop a culture of predictable and transparent engagement for stakeholders at all levels including internal staff building a collaborative culture with a foundation of trust and confidence in Seattle schools.

Best of luck.

Thank you.

I'm Jennifer Fransman, I'd like to give my time to Stephanie Franz.

Hi my name is Stephanie Franz I'm a parent of a first grader at Olympic Hills but I'm here tonight on behalf of over 100 families in Lake City's Little Brook neighborhood also known as the slice who could not be here tonight.

The voice of the families that will be the most affected by the proposed boundary changes are still not being heard.

I wish you could have seen the community boundary meeting at Olympic Hills.

The cafeteria was packed.

But we were told that that was meant to be informational, not listening.

That this was the venue for advocacy.

Despite tireless efforts we could not find a single Littlebrook family who could attend a meeting at 430 PM on a Wednesday in Soto.

One parent comment summed this up, we have come to every meeting, we have listened to all of the speakers, filled out comment cards with questions and concerns.

None of our questions have been answered and absolutely nothing has changed.

So please hear them now.

These proposed boundary changes disproportionately affect underserved kids and that's true across the entire north end.

In nearly every case low-income and ELL families are losing out when these boundaries are shifted back and forth to manage capacity.

Please reevaluate the boundary decisions.

Ensure that race and equity are priorities not just a puppet process.

As Phillip already stated and others the race and equity toolkit failed in its mission at Cedar Park.

The result is that surrounding schools will be losing diversity, kids with the greatest needs will be concentrated in an old awkward building where it will be very challenging to meet their needs.

Meanwhile, Olympic Hills will be opening up with amenities like a full-size library, a resource room, pullout learning spaces, childcare space, multiple bathrooms even.

Finally, please use more complete and more recent demographic data in your analysis.

Our community is one of the fastest growing neighborhoods in the city and we can't keep shuffling our most vulnerable kids back and forth.

Thank you for listening to our concerns and prioritizing our precious underserved children.

Thank you.

Dear board members thank you for the opportunity to speak tonight regarding the impacts of change areas 124 and 126 on our kids at West Woodland.

My name is Kirsten Holzman proudly I am the daughter of a public school teacher.

and her granddaughter my daughter Josie who I've got a picture of here is a first grader at West Woodland Elementary.

I believe in public education strongly and I fully support what you have done for Seattle schools which are phenomenal.

But like most people and most parents in our area we are very concerned about the proposed changes and in particular the lack of grandfathering that will impact, that will result in Josie having to change schools three times in her elementary career due to new plans for renovations at Daniel Bagley.

So that is a change in 2017 from West Woodland to Daniel Bagley, from Daniel Bagley to a temporary school in 2018 and then back to Daniel Bagley in 2020. And then of course a change again in 2021 when she goes to middle school.

So that's four school location changes in five years.

Building social connections, trust in teachers and peers and her surroundings as well as in afterschool programs is critical for providing the emotional and intellectual space for kids like Josie to learn.

These proposed changes particularly the lack of grandfathering will have devastating impacts and lifelong impacts on Josie's social and scholastic development.

Like many kids Josie struggles with anxiety during change and so we have endeavored to provide her with a consistent learning and afterschool care environment and these forced changes leave us with no options to continue that stability.

So given this we feel that we would like you to, I should say we implore you to recommend an amendment to allow 124 and 126 to remain within West Woodland.

If that is not possible we recommend grandfathering of all students at West Woodland especially those slated for Daniel Bagley.

If no grandfathering please delay the boundary changes until after renovations are complete and if not please provide an option in the choice program to prioritize seats for West Woodland students.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Michael Lipman.

And then Rosa Rodriguez.

I thank you for your time.

My name is Michael Lapham and I want to speak to the West Woodland boundary changes and urge you to consider grandfathering for the kids currently enrolled in the school.

Since the boundary changes were announced we spoke with about 50 families and every single one of them has been very concerned about the lack of grandfathering and each family has a different story about what issues are going to come up for them and the problems that it will cause.

When my wife and I heard about it, the first thing we did is we started looking at the research out there on impacts to kids for relocating schools.

And everything we found was that it was all negative.

It was negative to their academic success, negative to the percentage of kids to graduate high school, and even negative on their overall mental well-being, the change of the community, the displacement from their friends.

All these things cause issues.

My wife and I have two kids who just started kindergarten and pretty tough couple of months or weeks, pardon me, as far as anxiety and stress on them.

I think that they would be moved away and their friends that they are just now starting to create and be moved to a new school that all those other kids are making their friends and their connections to be the new kids in there is pretty upsetting and I hope you guys will consider grandfathering for the school.

Thank you.

Hi I'm Rosa Rodriguez PTA president at Sacajawea and I'm going to give my time to my co-PTA president Mr. Walker but I'd like to just say one thing that I love Sacajawea and I don't want to leave it.

Hi, Matthew Walker, I'm the health and fitness teacher at Sacajawea as well as the PTA co-president.

Yes, we'll be losing this family right here, my PTA co-chair and her children.

A lot of the diversity issues have already been addressed.

Absolutely, that's huge for me.

It's huge for what I'm about and what our school is about.

But I'm going to talk specifically to the grandfathering.

I've spent years developing personal relationships with some of our most at risk youth.

Some youth coming with incredibly traumatic experiences and backgrounds.

School becomes a haven for them.

It becomes a shelter, it becomes a home away from a home that they feel they don't have outside.

Those relationships that feeling is based on the connections with other students, the connections with adults that they grow and it takes years to develop those relationships and feelings of trust.

And then for those students and the students that are being pulled what we are talking about here is the largest percentage of those at risk students.

They are the ones being taken out of our school.

They are going to be put into a much larger school, they are going to be put in with new people, new peers, new teachers.

And what that does for them, it breaks my heart to think about how that is going to feel to them when they are taken away from us.

The people that they finally over multiple years have finally grown to trust and when I look at the fourth graders or the third graders that are going to experience this and then be pushed right into a middle school right after that.

how can we guarantee how we can take care of those students and our greatest mission here in Seattle school district is to take care of the individual students.

And I feel like in this process some of those individuals are being left behind.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

That was our last speaker and we are now going to move on to our Okay to our board comments.

Director Harris.

Thank you to everybody that turned out tonight.

We are listening.

We are reading our emails.

We absolutely appreciate suggested solutions.

We absolutely appreciate the grace and elegance that some of you all display in your emails.

And we don't so much the really crabby ones.

And please understand that the haters have started up again this week from all over the country, vile, disgusting, racist emails.

We're not getting rich up here.

We're trying real hard to do the right thing.

So when you push, push gently, make your point.

We're working real hard.

And I can darn sure tell you we're not getting rich.

Thank yous as well to the Nesholm family and the Nesholm's team.

What is going on at Denny and Aki and Mercer are beautiful things that would not happen without the Nesholm and the Satterberg money.

And in relation to that, those outlier schools are doing great things, their middle school math scores are up and if you recall we sent $2 million for middle school math curriculum and embedded in that is taking a look at the practices that are working at those three schools and melding the curriculum and the practices together.

So you know we talk a lot about replicating good practices here, this allows us to do that and it's very exciting work.

Thank you to the folks from Chief Sealth International High School District 6, alma mater of my daughter down the street from me and they are doing great work.

Remember though that they as well as Ingram and Rainier Beach have been hopping along without the funds necessary to do it right.

International baccalaureate is an expensive program.

We gave each of those schools $250,000 a year this year.

It is not sustainable money.

That was one time spent.

One of those things you want to ask about in the budget.

Thank you to the native community and the Haida singers.

That was spectacular and beautiful.

Spoke to my heart.

Thank you to Gail Morris and her team and the time immemorial curriculum and Shauna.

It's great stuff that we are doing but I was disturbed to hear that there is not enough money to have all the folks trained.

And I had the impression that that was underway and that we had to train the trainers model So in the words of the infamous Rick Burke, director who is not with us this evening, my ask to staff is that we find out exactly where we are and we report out in a Friday memo how many folks have been trained, what is the timeline, what is the path.

Boundary changes.

Makes my head spin.

I am hugely concerned that we have not identified pathways before we start moving bodies around and numbers around.

Pathways with respect to highly capable.

Pathways with respect to spread services and programs.

And I very much want to take up community members and some of my other directors colleagues ideas towards Cedar Park as an option school.

As an opt in advanced learning school.

So the folks that are at Cedar Park want to be there.

make socioeconomic and free and reduced lunch a tiebreaker because we can't do that by race any longer so says the US Supreme Court and we paid those legal bills.

And once we have young people that want to be there in that school then we test them to claw back some of the unfunded mandate of highly capable cohorts from the state.

Highly capable cohort funds from the state is a legal responsibility.

Now do they pay us for it enough?

Certainly, certainly not.

But that's just one of a long line of unfunded mandates from the state.

And I believe we are at $42.4 million of $100,000 a day fines from the state Supreme Court.

So if we did that, we could solve two or ten birds at one stone.

We could turn that school and the opt-in concept and the equity of advanced learning and highly capable into a pilot project.

And we could hold hands and go get it.

And I'm excited about the brainstorming that's been going on from folks because if we don't work together we get nowhere at all.

And we're not making the progress that we have to make.

Progress next Tuesday night Concord international elementary school district 6 South Park.

Dr. Kyle Kinoshita, Dr. Eric Anderson from the district will be presenting on the issues of testing at Concord elementary's invitation.

Come on down.

It's a terrific school and I can't wait to hear what they say.

I'm going to learn a lot.

and we probably will have interpreters there as well.

And I appreciate the good doctors coming and embracing these conversations and as you recall we passed some resolutions about testing and I've heard it from both candidates for the OSPI superintendent that they like our resolution.

So stay tuned Olympia and in November.

Seeing schools with Superintendent Larry Gatewood, West Seattle, High Point Elementary and Boren K7 was a blast.

Learned a great deal and even managed to get a meta moment poster so that I can frame it and put in my office.

I was able to attend the celebration for the new Chancellor of Seattle Colleges.

North Seattle, Central Seattle, South Seattle used to be referred to as community colleges.

Please don't do that because they are awarding bachelor's degrees and doing some great work.

A lot of great contacts including reestablishing contact with the president of South Seattle College.

towards moving the middle college high school back to that campus where it belongs.

Stay tuned on that.

Roxhill PTSA meeting Monday night got there right as the doors were closing for parents but was able to work with both the principal and PTSA presidents because we were here at curriculum and instruction earlier.

and I missed Associate Superintendent Herndon apparently in the parking lot who went to talk to the community about the move to EC Hughes and what that means.

And got great reviews from a community that frankly didn't feel very respected previously.

So props to you for that and thank you.

Again on the boundaries I would very much like to see the facilities management committee continue through and address the high school capacity crisis.

Putting those in separate silos doesn't make sense to me and if we are investing our time and asking our community members to dig deep then it would seem to me to be a righteous bridge and a continuum.

SPED placement at option schools, the board issued a written appeal on June 24 about how we determine placement of our programs and whether or not the placement of SPED services at option schools are unfair.

In the case we decided, we decided it was not unfair and it was appropriate under the district policies and the law.

However, we went a step further and said, let's take a look at this because we want to do better.

And in the interim of that decision being published, an OCR, Office of Civil Rights, complaint was filed.

So now we're in that sticky wicket where we're supposed to do the right thing.

But at the same time, we can't bring risk to the district.

So it's a balancing test.

And in order to show folks that we haven't forgotten our duty to follow through on that, we'll be having a work session on November 22nd.

extraordinarily awkward delicate position for us to be in but this board is committed to moving things forward and if nothing else discussing the needs and the issues.

And we have no idea when the OCR complaint will be ruled on.

Which is a little difficult to plan for to say the least.

With respect to the October 19 celebrations, literally hundreds of emails about these issues and it is so very disturbing to me.

This is 2016 and we need to let our children know that we recognize their plight.

And that we as adults stand next to them beside them.

My huge concern, however, is that we embed pedagogy and curriculum and don't make this a one day affair.

Just like we're talking about indigenous peoples, history and curriculum, we have to embed it in what we do every day, not just one day.

My next community meeting, I hope to have Saturday, a week from this Saturday.

I have not yet found a place.

I will find one and get it posted as soon as possible.

Thank you ever so much.

Before we go on I actually wanted to acknowledge our two board directors who came after roll call which is Director Jill Geary and Director Stefan Blanford.

So now I'm actually at this time I would like to ask Director Peters as chair of the Audit and Finance Committee to make an announcement for the internal audit and ethics annual report.

And then after Medina provides his report we will then continue on with our directors comments.

Okay Andrew Medina the district's director of internal audit and ethics officer will be providing two annual reports.

The annual internal audit report as required by board procedure 6550BP and the annual ethics report as required by board policy 5251. Thank you Andrew.

Hello Andrew Medina director of internal audit and ethics officer.

I'm here to provide two annual reports.

The first is the annual internal audit report.

Board procedure requires that I provide an annual report that covers audits completed, major findings, corrective actions taken by administrative managers, and significant findings which have not been addressed by management.

So this year we completed 10 audits.

This is fairly consistent with our productivity over prior years.

Last year we had 12 audits, 11 the year before that and nine the year before that.

This year we did have an auditor resign in February and that position is still vacant.

We did just have someone accept an offer who is expected to start on October 24 so we are excited about that.

The next three slides identify some of our more significant findings.

These aren't in any sort of order as far as severity.

These are just certain issues that represent items that we're going to want to monitor to ensure that corrective action is being taken.

I'll let you read them but I wasn't going to go through each individual finding in detail primarily due to time limitations and also because the audit reporting process is already very transparent.

Each internal audit finding is discussed in detail at a public audit and finance committee meeting.

In addition to that, all completed audit reports are posted on our department's public webpage and at the next regularly scheduled board meeting after an Audit and Finance Committee meeting, the Audit and Finance Committee chair will make an announcement that internal audit has completed more reports and where to locate those.

The next topic is corrective actions taken by administrative managers.

It's important to note that the corrective action process is a management function.

As auditors we make recommendations only and we don't have any authority to direct staff to write procedures or create internal controls.

Once we make a recommendation it's up to management to determine how they're going to address that.

To help them they have The district has employed an audit response manager who assists departments in developing the corrective action plans.

All corrective action plans are approved by the superintendent and then distributed to the Audit and Finance Committee and each quarter the Audit and Finance Committee receives an update on the status of the corrective action plans.

The next slide provides some data to demonstrate how well management is responding to internal audit findings.

Green being good, yellow okay, and red is a concern.

To date we have issued over 300 total recommendations since the internal audit department was created.

Of those only 2% are currently overdue.

7% are in progress meaning they are still within their six-month window of trying to resolve those audit recommendations or they have been granted an extension by the Audit and Finance Committee.

Last year and the year before the percentage of overdue recommendations was four.

This year it's down to two which I think is a positive sign that management is making progress towards correcting the internal audit findings.

Significant findings not addressed by management.

I just want to clarify that we haven't had any disagreements with management.

They have concurred with all of our findings.

These are just two areas that have been delayed for a variety of reasons.

Point of sale system was delayed initially due to funding.

Funding has been resolved so we are hopeful that this will be implemented by the start of next school year.

The other item related to custodial evaluation document and there's also actually another one related to custodial overtime that require bargaining so those won't be able to be addressed until next summer when that collective bargaining agreement comes up for negotiation.

The internal audit plan for the current year has been approved by the Audit and Finance Committee and is available on our website.

The plan can be changed if new risks are identified so I just want to remind everyone if you do become aware of some significant concern please reach out and let me know.

And then lastly I forgot to include it on the slides but I was asked to inform you of a project that I've been asked to lead for the Council of great city schools.

They've asked me to develop a white paper specific to the school district internal audit function.

We've got a team of volunteers that's helping me out and we're kind of each authoring different sections but the goal is that when it's done it will provide some best practices for other school district internal audit functions and it will also hopefully be able to demonstrate the value that an internal audit function can provide to a school district.

So that's in progress and the goal is to have that finalized in the spring.

Were there any questions specific to the internal audit report before I go on to the ethics report?

Director Pinkham.

Can you go back to what you said, how many recommendations are overdue?

I think you said four but in the handout it says seven.

Overdue, 2% of them are overdue.

In prior years it was 4% and they have been able to knock that down to 2% as far as the actual number.

The number is 7 but that represents 2% of the total record.

Okay so you are talking percentages there.

Thank you.

Is there any more questions or comments from any of the directors?

Director Peters.

So Andrew after you complete your report and present it for the Council of great city schools I think the board would be interested in seeing what you present so in the spring perhaps you can come back to us and give us an overview and include the materials for us to take a look at and I'm sure the public will be interested as well.

I'm hoping it will be done by the time I'm up for my oversight work session which is scheduled for May I believe.

Great thank you.

And the ethics policy.

now requires that I provide an annual report that covers the number and types of contacts received, percentage of contacts submitted anonymously and the status of the ethics training program.

So for each contact I receive they get logged into one of nine categories.

You can see 50% of those are advisory opinions.

These are people asking for advice.

Usually they are being proactive and wanting to make sure they are doing the right thing before they actually do it.

The high number of advisory opinions is actually very encouraging and the majority of employees do want to make sure they are behaving appropriately.

12% are ethics complaints.

Another 12% are personnel complaints.

These typically involve discrimination, harassment, bullying.

They are not considered ethics, they don't qualify for whistleblower.

These are forwarded on to human resources.

8% are people that are just exploring available options when they don't provide enough information to launch an actual investigation.

They are just callers that want to know what their options are.

7% are whistleblower complaints.

Complaints involving allegations of an illegal activity, a gross waste of public funds, or a violation of school board policy or superintendent procedure.

Typically these are referred back to management to investigate.

But I do have the authority to retain them if I deem necessary.

I know this has been a concern so I just kind of wanted to quickly address the types of complaints that I would typically retain.

Those would involve any complaints involving a member of senior management, I would retain those.

Any complaint, if a manager was named in a complaint, obviously it would never get sent back to them to investigate.

If the complaint has already been reviewed by management once and the complainant is able to provide some sort of documentation that the initial review may have been flawed, that I will launch an independent investigation for those.

Complaints requiring technical expertise not possessed by management, for example a financial complaint requiring fraud investigation or forensic analysis.

If there is a complaint related directly to an item on the current internal audit plan I would probably just retain those within the internal audit department since we will be going into that area anyway.

And then lastly is a complaint that I deem to be a high-profile area.

Basically if the allegations would be damaging to the district if found to be true I would go ahead and retain those.

Basically with the belief that such a complaint would be better served by having an independent

Director Harris.

This is perhaps a softball because we have been continuing a conversation on this issue.

How many of the 205 contacts have you retained?

And opened up an ethics investigation on?

For all of the ethics ones, I retain those.

Whether or not I've actually launched, gone to the point where I've hired an investigator, I believe that's only happened three times.

The rest of those I'm usually able to resolve just by doing some preliminary inquiries on my own as to whether or not if the allegation were to be found to be true would this generally be a Would it be an actual violation of the district's ethics policy?

And a lot of times the complaints that come in the case is no.

And those end up being.

Does that also include the whistleblower scenarios?

So I will evaluate the whistleblowers also before referring them out just to make sure there is some, one to make sure that there is not an ethics component to them or retaliation piece to them.

But if they don't meet one of the kind of categories that I just went through then those usually go back to management.

There have been a few where I've been able just to resolve very quickly.

They didn't require a formal investigation and the complainant was satisfied but for the most part yes they are going back to, going out to another district department.

That brings in line kind of a philosophical issue about conflicts and the internal auditors position and I appreciate that you are doing the best you can with the money and the staff that you have.

However, I wonder if this is as robust as it needs to be and or if we need to design a better mousetrap here.

If you had a top three ask for what you would do to make this a more robust division in terms of whistleblower ethics what would that be?

Well I don't know.

I mean I would like some time to come up with actually a top three but having a more resources for investigations would certainly be one.

I'm going to get to the training program and the work that is lacking there on an upcoming slide.

I don't want to put you on the spot but maybe we could do a Friday memo to that effect because if we start a program or a department we need to be able to do it right and to support our people.

And I would very much like to know what you see as the needs because this is a huge issue I think and it's a risk management issue as well.

I don't know it's difficult because there are concerns, I mean people come to me maybe because they don't trust going through HR or through another function.

However, that's kind of why HR is there.

Also, when the ethics office was created, even when it was with the City of Seattle, I mean it wasn't designed to do whistleblower complaints.

So I feel as though we are doing what we are charged with doing and I think more of the question you are asking is should the department, should the whole ethics office be doing more than what it's actually been designed to do.

The other types of complaints received, other items are just items that aren't related to ethics or complaints.

Other school districts have contacted me regarding starting an ethics office, people have called for training requests, public records requests, miscellaneous complaints or complaints that aren't really considered ethics and they don't qualify for whistleblower protection.

And then there's conflict of interest disclosures and retaliation complaints.

Overall the workload has remained at about eight contacts per month which is consistent since I took over the ethics officer role.

This slide shows how many of the total contacts were submitted anonymously.

Again, this is all contacts.

So keep it in mind that a lot of the different types of contacts that I just went through aren't normally going to be anonymous, advisory opinions, conflict of interest disclosures.

I went ahead and created another slide that shows anonymous complaints.

So this one is specific to just complaints.

And overall you can see that 57% of complaints are submitted anonymously.

This is a bit concerning because it shows that a majority of people with concerns don't have enough trust in the system to provide their names.

And this could imply that there is still a general fear of retaliation.

Of the complaints that normally do get referred to other departments, the personnel complaints and whistleblower complaints, you can see that they are over 70% of those are anonymous while the ones that I typically retain, the ethics complaints, are only at about 36% anonymous.

So this could signify general trust in the ethics office.

Director Blanford.

I'm curious if you have any trend data on the ratio of complaints that are anonymous to those that aren't.

I'm interested in knowing if, I know when I came on the board there was an orientation and one of the points that was shared was that the cultural issues around trust had been pretty low and so I'm wondering if they are trending upwards or same type of?

Since it's only been just over two years I haven't gone into that detail yet.

I can put that together that shouldn't be difficult to show to see if the anonymous complaints have gone down at all.

But it's part of your protocol to keep that statistic?

Yeah.

receive a complaint I make an indication if it's been anonymous or not so I can go back through the log and certainly break it up by time period.

It seems to me that would be an interesting metric for us to look at over time to see if trust is increasing or decreasing over time.

And then lastly the ethics training program is still a work in progress.

Due to the loss of auditor that I mentioned I was unable to dedicate more time to this this year.

Currently the ethics policy is covered as part of new employee orientation.

There is a safe schools training that employees can log into and take however it really is just a review of the policy.

I will reply to requests for training which did happen a couple of times this year.

And I have initiated contact with our media operations center about developing some online training material.

Ideally I'd like to get some videos out there that employees could log in and view.

One just kind of a general ethics training and then have some more shorter videos that can be geared towards specific employee groups or towards specific situations such as a two to three minute video on accepting gifts or seeking outside employment.

So when you're saying on here it says work in progress does that mean you haven't started the orientation training yet?

Or is it in progress?

Ethics training is part of the new employee orientation.

I say it's a work in progress I'm just saying.

We do have some ethics training but we would just, I would like to expand it and to see more of it and to have more resources, training resources available.

And so what I think more of the to-do is working with the media operations center and trying to develop those online videos since it is so difficult at the district to try and coordinate in-person training.

And to kind of respect people's times just having something that available that they could go to you know from their desks I think would be more helpful, and that's the part that's more in progress Thank you Okay, so were there any other questions related to ethics Thank you, thank you

So we are going to continue our board's comments.

Director Geary.

As always thank you to everybody who came and spoke to us.

A special thank you to our student Casey Kuno.

It is great to hear about Chief Sealth and her compatriot who came.

It is heartwarming to see kids who are doing so well in their school and are so proud of their schools.

And it's my goal that every one of our students feels that way of course.

Thank you to the National Foundation.

for all the support and the great work that they are doing and helping us to do.

And I also very much appreciate their pushing the Satterberg foundation into making a similar grant to expand that work.

And I guess the part about that that is so heartening to me is that these are people, it's a very open-ended relationship.

It is not one that comes with lots of strings and data and it is this idea that if we come and we do the work we will see the results.

And we're not going to threaten the people, we're not going to threaten the schools in doing that.

And they have shown us that that model works really well.

And they're encouraging other foundations to take up that work.

And the Satterberg foundation grant that we're going to be talking about is much larger than the other grants that they have ever given.

And much more open-ended if you look at their website and so we have to be so appreciative of that work and thank you to the principals Jeff Clark, Mia Williams, and Chris Carter who came to stand up and embrace that work as well.

I just appreciate that so much.

Since our last meeting I attended the Washington school director associations legislative committee, we call it WASDA, in Spokane where all the school directors get together to develop the legislative agenda for the schools.

And so of course We are 53,000 very big and we have school districts that are under 100,000, I mean 100 students.

And so the interests of these different districts can be very broad and to try and come up with a legislative agenda that we can all agree upon.

You know that's impressive.

Of course everybody circles around the idea of funding and that wasn't difficult to see what that looks like and there are some very conservative districts and very small districts that don't have the ability to raise the levy money that we do and so some of our big asks become threatening to them and so we have to be respectful that the asks that we make at a legislative level work for all the different districts.

But they also respect I think that Seattle is doing a lot of work and has a lot of challenges that they don't have and so that was heartening and they were so pleased to see Seattle have a presence at this meeting and be part of the conversation and so I'm going to continue to work really hard to maintain those relationships so that when we as the school directors go to Olympia we go together to fight for all of the kids of Washington state and I think if we get that very cooperative relationship we may see changes out of Olympia that benefit all kids and that we don't feel it's one group or another always having to go to the plate.

Another initiative that came up that was very interesting was around the alternative assessments and there was strong support in some of the districts for that and Spokane as one very much came out in favor of trying to get alternative assessments particularly at the high school level.

And so we were able to pass and get included in the legislative agenda looking at that.

And I wasn't aware that there were other districts out there looking at that issue as we are and so that was heartening as well to go out and find another big school district willing to take up that mantle trying to look at the burden on schools.

One of the initiatives that didn't pass that was really interesting though was the idea that we should be asking for a student bill of rights when it comes to assessment.

And that the impact on students and their learning should be a key part of any analysis when we are putting assessments and we are designing more assessments and treating them as things that we mine data from, their education.

What is the real impact on them?

And again sometimes the burden of tying all this information to the efforts deadens the purpose of the efforts.

We want to continue, it didn't pass but there was some great discussion about that and so I was heartened by that.

But again it is funding and we all need to remember that we have to go to Olympia and ask that they fund education.

I had a chance to visit TOPS with wife Jessie and appreciated that and had an opportunity to see how they are integrating the deaf and hard of hearing community into the school to the point that there appears to be a track where Children who use ASL to participate can be in the general education classroom, they have a track and can be in the general education classroom.

And so it's very integrated and that is great and I just wonder in my own pipe dream kind of way, wouldn't it be great if some of those kids in there were learning ASL at the same time?

Some of the English, speaking children, hearing children, I don't know exactly how we would say it.

And I think that's something that I would like to personally continue to look at as a dual language option because if we have the resources in a place and it is a language that is recognized and allows access to education I think there are a lot of kids and families that might be interested in having the opportunity to have their children learn American Sign Language alongside of the kids who are receiving that as part of their education.

So just something I thought of, I'd love to hear from people.

about what they think about that.

Thank you to the Haida heritage and coming to dance for us.

That is wonderful and exciting that we have our Duwamish nation resolution before us and happy to hear from people on that.

That has come to us with some difficulty in terms of hearing from different communities.

We saw a hint of that tonight with one of our speakers.

And I guess my getting away from the politics, the money, the federal recognition.

It's important that we recognize our people, all of our people here.

And it goes back to as a nation, as a city, as a school district, we are stronger when we are united in supporting all of our people.

And so I'm proud that we can support our people.

And I would like to see everybody support the different types of people that we have within our district.

Be that the Duwamish nation, be it the groups of people for whom our pride in saying black lives matter fearlessly really speaks to their heart and we have to stand united with our schools as they work on these issues to bring all of our kids into this united district, this united city that appreciates us each for who we are.

So exciting things are happening and I'm very proud of that.

With regard to the boundary changes, wow, yes, maybe too much too fast as one of the little signs said today.

I'm not going to go through it all again because you have all heard eloquently from each other and as Director Harris said we are listening, we are thinking.

I am exhausted every night trying to think about how and what we need to do in terms of process.

in terms of tweaks.

What are the changes that can be made?

Because there are some changes that I think we can go forward with that we aren't hearing that people are fairly satisfied with.

And those changes came out of processes where the principals that were impacted got together, talked and came up with a plan and proposed it and I think those are the ones we are not hearing from.

And so those are the ones I think we can go forward on now.

But the ones where we are generating so much comment I think we need perhaps to slow down and look at that.

And I don't know what that means in terms of capacity but we are full and it sounds to me like people are willing to remain full and get it right and take on that discomfort rather than the discomfort of the families.

And I guess I really want to highlight.

the comments of Matt Walker the health teacher who said that when you