School Board Meeting Date Sept. 21st, 2016 Pt1

Yes, I am.

We're going to get our meeting started.

I want to welcome everyone here today to the September 21 regular board meeting and I also would like to welcome our student representative Kennedy Harrison.

Ms. Harrison will have an opportunity to provide comments regarding her school later in the meeting.

Ms. Ritchie roll call please.

And also I would like to say that Director Harris will not be here today due to the fact that she is under the weather.

Director Blanford.

Here.

Director Burke.

Here.

Director Geary.

Here.

Director Peters.

Here.

Director Pinkham.

Here.

Director Patu.

Here.

If everyone please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.

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

At this time I would like to recognize some of the extraordinary staff in our district.

I will turn it over to Dr. Nyland for his remarks.

All right we have several recognitions tonight starting with CTE.

We've got, we want to recognize a number of outstanding educators.

They were recently recognized by the state Washington Association of career and technical education and I would invite Dan Gullisman skill center and CTE principal to the podium.

Hello thank you for having us.

And I might ask my colleague Dan Gallagher to introduce two of the staff.

We've got two staff from the CTE department and two from skill center.

So just a little bit about, my name is Dan Goldstone I'm the principal for the skill center and just a little bit about the skill center for those of you who don't know.

It is a program in Seattle Public Schools for 16 to 20-year-olds who they can gain industry-recognized certificates and credits in advanced CTE courses that result in opportunities to advance their career and college opportunities after high school.

So our two skills center course, I'm going to just take this mic right out of here if I can.

Our two skills center teachers who got awards this year.

Let me just make sure I've got the name of the awards correct.

Graca Ribeiro known as chef to her students won the new professional teacher of the year award.

And Bonnie Tidwell at Lincoln high school teaches medical assisting and won the health science teacher of the year award.

Thank you.

Hi I'm Dan Gallagher Director of Career and College Readiness which also includes the career and technical education programs.

I want to recognize the great work of Myrna Muto.

Please stand.

She works here in the central office supporting our teachers, our guidance counselors and our principals and she won the guidance counselor specialist of the year award.

I also want to recognize, excuse me and thank Roxanne Trees.

Roxanne made a special visit back with us tonight because she retired at the end of last year after many years of service and that was recognized this summer not only for Seattle but across the state as she won the lifetime achievement award.

All right we'd like all of you to come down front we invite the school board to come down and recognize you shake your hand and we'll take a picture.

Thank you.

And I apologize I want to recognize Susie Cridmore.

Didn't recognize her, she's not a teacher but she's spending her time here as a community member, as a community advisor and she also won an award for her work with the community.

So thank you to Susie as well.

All right.

Thank you.

And we'll get the school board a few extra steps in here we'll go down and do this again in just a moment.

But we'd like to recognize Tebra Ruth Halperin teacher at Laurelhurst.

Now at Thurgood Marshall Elementary she was selected recently to receive a presidential award for excellence in mathematics and science teaching.

Received a citation from President Obama and a $10,000 award from the National Science Foundation and I invited Director Geary to say a few words about awesome teaching.

I have known Debbie Halperin as we call her at Laurelhurst since my now sophomore in college entered that school as a kindergartner and what I would say about Debbie Halperin is that we at Laurelhurst were so lucky to have her first as a math specialist and then one of our elementary teachers in that she brought that extra attention to our math curriculum, shared her knowledge with our whole school, looked for the kids who excelled, tried to instill a love of math in every one of our students.

And while I know the Laurelhurst community I have heard from so many that we are sad that she is no longer at Laurelhurst for all that she brought to us.

We will miss her so much and I just look so forward to hearing from her about the work she's doing at Thurgood Marshall because I know they're so lucky to have her.

But thank you Debbie for your 17 years of service to the Seattle Public Schools and all the good work you've done.

Awesome.

Thank you for inviting me to this school district board meeting and taking a moment to honor me.

It would be more appropriate however to honor what I do in my classroom that led to my being nominated by parents and then being selected by the National Science Foundation for the highest award given to K-12 teachers in this country for excellence in teaching mathematics.

I start each lesson by posing problems and scenarios that pique the curiosity of my students and lead them to consider the mathematical ideas that I want them to construct.

My third, fourth, and even my second graders often spend several days grappling with a single complex problem, working in pairs or small groups, using objects, Drawing diagrams, discussing and arguing, defending their ideas and challenging those of their classmates.

I do not correct the students as they discuss and consider various hypotheses but only ask probing questions that create a wave of classroom curiosity that gets even the most disinterested students engaged.

In my class, errors are not to be avoided, but are in fact celebrated, as errors generally contain their own elegant logic that we can explore and use to gain even deeper insight into the mathematics.

So kids in my class feel safe considering ideas even though they may not be correct.

They're captivated by the power of doing their own thinking, of grappling with interesting problems and solving them in their own ways.

The level of deep mathematical thinking that happens in my class is truly remarkable.

Kids develop their own algorithms that correctly account for and solve the problems.

I don't initially teach procedures because research shows that this inhibits the complex thinking that leads kids to really understand the mathematics at a deep level.

Instead I create a learning laboratory that fosters the student's ability to think logically and critically and most importantly it fosters a passion for learning mathematics.

Unfortunately too many of our students are still plotting through textbooks, practicing procedures and honing their test-taking skills and consequently believing that mathematics is boring and irrelevant.

I believe there are some concrete steps we can take as a district to help teachers turn our math classrooms into vibrant learning laboratories that provide our students with a strong foundation and a lifelong love of mathematics.

Since my time is limited this afternoon I will stop here and invite all school board members to reach out to me so we might continue this conversation.

Thank you so much.

All right we will invite you down front and we will invite the board down front.

Yeah.

All right.

Thank you all.

I have a brief commercial announcement here.

Not really.

Regarding the state auditor's report to get this written read into the record I guess kind of like the Library of Congress Every year we have to pay the state auditor as mandated by law for their work auditing our systems.

This year the cost will be approximately $346,890.

The expenditure was presented at the September 8 audit and finance committee Originally as a board action report but since we are required to pay the auditors every year and there is no discretion for the board staff made the recommendation to move it forward as an informational item only.

The audit and finance committee agreed and asked that we draw attention to this expenditure at this meeting.

So we do appreciate the work of the state auditor.

No we don't have a choice in whether we pay them or not but they do provide good advice for us in terms of making sure that we account properly for the money and the audit and finance committee and our business department reviews their work in great depth.

With that I would like to invite Director Sue Peters to add some additional comments with regard to the work of the audit and finance committee.

Thank you Superintendent Nyland.

So as the Audit and Finance Chair I am also required to read a couple paragraphs here regarding our internal audit in this case.

At the September 13 quarterly Audit and Finance Committee meeting the Office of Internal Audit presented an internal audit report on central administration cash handling and deposits.

The audit focused on the security of deposits as they are transported to the bank and on the timeliness of posting deposits to the district's accounting system.

All findings and recommendations are discussed at a public audit and finance committee meeting and the completed reports are available online at the office of internal audits public webpage.

You can find that under departments and under the district tab and then click on internal audit.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right.

Eliminating opportunity gaps is one important part of our work.

It's one of the five goal areas that the school board is moving toward adopting for this coming year.

As we have looked at our data we find our data to be interesting, exciting, compelling, sobering, all of the above in that we have a really positive trend line district wide.

It means that our teachers and our principals are taking the state and national standards seriously and preparing students.

I was going to say well however the second part of my statement is that we still have unacceptably large gaps for our students of color.

So that's been as I've talked about it the issue of our time how do we find better ways to reach out and serve students that historically we have not served as well as we should.

And then the third part of my statement is that we do have about a dozen schools that are outperforming the state.

in closing those gaps.

So we have some places to look within the district to find ideas and things that we can do to close those gaps.

A year or more ago I guess more like 16-18 months ago we brought all of our district leadership together and looked at the research on what we could find out about closing opportunity gaps and we identified four areas to work on.

There are certainly more things that we could be doing but these four are the areas that we have focused on and that the school board has supported with financial backing.

The first one is positive learning.

That's that overall trend line that I mentioned that teachers have been doing well and our scores on average have been going up districtwide and outperforming our peers.

The second area is positive beliefs and the school board has invested money in that.

A year ago the school board put in place a moratorium on elementary suspensions and they provided about a million dollars in funding for RULER which is a social emotional curriculum and PBIS which also supports that positive belief and work with each and every student.

Positive partnerships, we are blessed with I think about 300 community-based organizations working side-by-side with us in the schools as well as the city of Seattle with the mayor's work on the educational summit on how to close, eliminate opportunity gaps.

The fourth area is positive relationships and one of our understandings is that we have done maybe as well as we can possibly do in terms of academics.

We will continue to do that work.

We don't want to let that work slide at all.

But for many of our students with those large gaps and what's the saying until they know how much we care.

They don't necessarily care how much we know and how much we care about the academics.

So thanks to a partnership with district leaders and with SEA and with PASS that was the focus for professional development day on September 1st.

The first time in what did we hear 2002 so 15 years something like that.

The first time that we have done a districtwide PD event and well-received well-facilitated and as I visited maybe a dozen schools since then I've seen evidence in each of those schools of the positive relationship work that they've done.

So I would like to ask Mike Strausky to come to the podium and share a little bit of what we won't be able to give you.

an adequate representation but at least a taste of some of the things that schools have been doing in that area.

Directors, Mike Strosky chief of schools.

So as Dr. Nyland was mentioning on September 1 we had our first districtwide tri-day which included not only just everyone at our building levels but also our central office folks that were really focused on delivering content both teachers delivering content at their buildings, principals delivering content, central office delivering content about how do we effectively intentionally build relationships between adults and between adults and kids in service of increasing outcomes for our students.

And so publicly I would like to thank Pat Sander and her team for the tremendous amount of planning that it took to pull that off.

There is probably a real reason why we waited 14 years to do this level of work.

It is a lot of work.

But it was well-received work.

And one of the things that we are trying to do is leverage how that day is not just a day but it is a way that we are trying to behave professionally across our system.

And so one of the things I'd like to talk about specifically is how we are working with our principals.

Yesterday we had 100 principals in this room for our monthly leadership learning day and one of the focus areas for us was how can we share and deprivatize the good things that buildings had created and co-constructed together at their buildings with one another so that we can replicate some of that good work.

And we've heard many times to the board is that there's good things going on and great things going on at our schools and how can we replicate that.

And so one of the things that we're trying to be intentional is creating those opportunities.

And so yesterday was a learning opportunity for our principals And how we started off that meeting in the morning was just giving them the opportunity to talk about what they specifically did as a result of the tri-day that was specifically around relationships.

So deprivatizing their practice and sharing their practice and hopefully throughout the day continuing to do that.

So we created the space for them to do that but how we leverage that and how we are leveraging the tri-day specifically on relationships with our principals is that we are embarking on cycles of inquiry specifically directed on how can and what can our principals learn on behalf of students, our underrepresented students, our students of color, our African-American males, our students who are not yet succeeding at the levels that we want them to.

What can we be learning as leaders to impact those students and those families in our communities.

And so a lot of great dialogue happening yesterday.

Our executive directors of schools led our principals through a cycle of inquiry process based on data, based on building wide data, district data, data that we don't have yet that they want to create and be able to get.

And one of the things that we are seeing within our buildings with our principals yesterday is about the relationships that they are making with each other, about how does that trickle down to the relationships that they make with their teachers and how does that specifically relate to how teachers make those relationships with their students.

And so we know there is a lot of great things going on but we got to percolate that back up to the principals so that they can share with one another and learn from one another.

So with the cycle of inquiry work what we are doing is we are leveraging that into their professional growth goals and in their professional growth goals we are asking them to specifically pick out students at a very small granular level that are not yet succeeding at levels that they want them to and then how and what can the principals learn that can help those students.

And so we know that there's many adults in between the principal and those students and so one of the things that we are working on is trying to practice some of the things and when we hear good practice we want to share that practice.

So one of the things that we did yesterday we had one of our principals, first-year principal in Seattle at one of our schools.

shared with us about how she created this six word memoir activity that she wanted principals to be able to mimic something that she tried with her staff and if I can get it down to 30 seconds I will be surprised but I will try.

What she wanted to do and what she did with her staff was give them the opportunity to say why they do this work, why are we in education, why do you do this, what's the relationships that you are hoping to build, why do you do what you do.

And what she showed us was a brief video of can you get it down to six words.

and it's very hard.

And so what we did is we gave the principals 15 minutes to come up with six words that describe something that means something to them very powerfully that is based in relationships or says why you do this work.

And so what our principals did and I got to say there are some incredible powerful things that came out of this.

And the six word memoirs are something that we are going to be displaying here because this is where we learn as principals or as leaders, central office leaders included.

And so the next time that you come here we will have those displayed here.

And the reason why we have it publicly displayed is because we want people to start making connections with us and also we want to be making connections with other people around our work about why we do this work.

And so when you see the six word memoir up here in this room you will know why it is up there and you will know who is writing that work.

So it is a small thing but it is a big thing and I will say why it is a small thing is it came out of one building, one principal, one staff that now has impacted 100 buildings and our central office staff as well and hopefully you as well.

So that's just a brief example of some of the work that we are doing specifically around relationships.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Keeping with that theme for just a moment, I had the opportunity to be at Madrona I guess a few days ago.

Senator Patty Murray was here and as I walked through Madrona they had the mood meter up and the posters everywhere about how are you feeling and what the meta moments are.

And so evidence of the social emotional learning that they have been doing as a school.

And then completely unbeknownst to us Senator Murray echoed a lot of those same remarks and I guess I learned something that I didn't know that she came from a large family and her mother was a chief support for her and her siblings.

And they didn't have a lot but they did have that constant mantra that you can be anything that you want to be if you never give up.

So it was a perfect message for the kids.

Ballard High School did as they have done every year for a number of years.

They had 1800 student names on cutout stars posted throughout the building and students were encouraged to find their own star and put it on their locker.

So again a nice way to let every student know that they are important, they are recognized by name and the principal Kevin Wynkoop continues to be responsible for link crew so he gets all of the ninth graders together in the gym and that is his point of personal connection to build a relationship with each of the students.

West Woodland Elementary, wow they have built relationships in a big way.

They have enough parent volunteers to come in and offer 21 after school activities so that students can stay until their normal I guess previous ending time at the end of the school day and be engaged in 21 different learning activities by parents.

And then I started this week Monday at Bailey Gatzert where the principal was greeting students in 10 different languages.

It's a very diverse school.

And it was call and respond.

So the students knew these 10 different greetings so it was another opportunity for them to recognize the importance of each of the many many different cultures that they have present in their building.

And then as I visited classrooms virtually every classroom had pictures of the students already displayed with their name beneath the student again showing the importance of each and every So I'll come back and talk a little bit about the board retreat that was held on the 10th and as I did on that date give kudos to the board.

The board has kept the focus on three goals for three years.

Our academic goal of excellence, our eliminating the opportunity gap of equity and our community engagement goal.

in addition to two other goals for this coming year which are budget and program review.

And as I told the board I just couldn't be more pleased and excited about that continued focus that the board has given us.

So that meant that at the retreat, summer leadership Institute for all of our principals That meant that we could have far more alignment and coherence.

It meant that we could have that tri-day planned and partnered with our central office staff and with SEA and with PASS and then it allowed for this work that Mike just told us about in each and every one of our schools across the district.

I would comment just briefly on other aspects of the retreat.

The retreat started with a focus on the budget and the board has asked that we do several things with regard to the budget.

One is to review the weighted staffing student, I can't ever get that right.

Anyway the formula that we use to allocate staff and to see if we can make that simpler and easier to understand and so that's work that we'll be doing this fall.

They've also asked that we look at the overall budget to find out where do we spend our money and are we spending it in all the right places or are there some places that we would prefer to spend the money.

And a really really quick overview of a 60 slide presentation that I'm sure is posted somewhere is that much of our levy, I think our levy is $195 million and $100 million of that goes for salaries.

teachers, administrators, IA's, classified, custodians and probably another $20 million goes for special ed salaries and something goes for ELL salaries.

So a huge portion of our levy goes for salaries to make sure that our employees are paid market or competitive rates.

Beyond that our staffing for teachers is about what the state formula calls for.

With that recognition that we are meeting the state formula and we are paying one third of the teachers salary above and beyond what the state gives us.

Within that it gets varied.

We staff nursing a little bit better than the state average.

We staff security a little bit better than the state formula.

And we staff IA's and counselors and family support workers less so than the state formula.

So, we will continue that work through the year to try to find out is that how we want to spend our money so just kind of daylighting what we do and how we spend our money.

The other one that is challenging for us in the teaching role is that we are allocating staff pretty much per state formula, however then we have Montessori, K5, K8, dual language and a variety of option schools that take just a little bit more funding than that formula.

So that means that other schools maybe are getting a little bit less than what that state formula looks like so that we can make good, well that's overly stated, we can try to make good on the promises that we've made for some of our special programs.

The board continued to take a look at the SMART goals which I have mentioned and that will be coming up on one of the next board meetings for official approval.

And the board also set aside some funding to support those districtwide SMART goals so appreciate the board's support for making that happen.

They also set aside $2 million to start with middle school math adoption.

And then we ended that day with a conversation around eliminating opportunity gaps and what that means at the district level and recognition that we still have a lot of work to do in that area.

Recently John Muir as of last Friday and leading up to that date has been much in the news.

They took very seriously the work from the summer leadership Institute around eliminating the opportunity gap.

They looked closely at their data I think they are about 48% African-American.

And they noted the fact that they had gaps that they needed to close.

And they made an all-in commitment to building their CSIP, their school improvement plan around eliminating opportunity gaps.

And staff made an individual commitment.

And then they had planned an event for Friday with a lot of their African-American dads present to welcome students to school.

We've done that at South Shore, we've done it at West Seattle, I think Leschi did it recently as well.

I was at the event at South Shore and just exciting and over-the-top enthused as students came to school who might not otherwise be that enthralled and excited about coming to school and see how they perk up being greeted and with all of that enthusiasm.

That was followed with a presentation to students by many of the dads with very poignant personal stories about what's possible and some of the challenges that they had overcome.

So, we had a lot of national news with regard to the t-shirts that teachers wore with regard to Black Lives Matter and that was certainly, we certainly are all in around eliminating the opportunity gap and kind of unfortunately nationally that became affiliated are we supporting a particular movement or not.

The only movement we are supporting is we are supporting the movement to eliminate the opportunity gap.

So the response after the event was equally, I don't know what to call that, we had a lot of response after the event as well as before the event and the response after the event came from our parents and from many of our African-American dads who participated.

We had one email I think from a 59-year-old community member, African-American, who said said that he wrote with tears in his eyes because he appreciated the work that was being done.

So thank you to Directors Blanford, Geary and Pinkham for attending that event.

We last week also had a board work session in this room around several critical issues that are coming up.

The two that we spent the most time on were the 20 minute longer school day coming one year from now and related change in terms of an early release late start And we have a fairly brief amount of time in order to make the decision whether we will extend the school year next year by adding time at the beginning of the day, at the end of the day, or some of each.

So the school board gave some guidance in terms of how we would go about having that community engagement and hearing from the public about their preferences.

Other issues coming up, oh and I should mention on that one the school board asked if there was a way to move off the transportation decision and yes we will be able to move that back at least a little bit and we will keep you posted on how far we can move that in order to give a little bit more time for the community engagement.

Also coming up are boundary revisions.

Dr. Herndon is holding a variety of community meetings around kind of a combination of boundary changes.

The board approved those boundary changes in 2013 so in some cases it's just, I don't know what to call that.

a review and a reaffirmation of those same boundary changes that maybe weren't that important or personal to individuals three years ago but now as their students are older it's kind of like oh that's my child.

In other cases there will be some tweaks recommended by with regard to those boundaries and one of the ones that is causing some angst is we may or may not be able to keep grandfathered arrangements for all of the students in all of those boundaries.

Coming up in my remark shortly is that we grew by roughly another thousand students this year and so we are now three years into the boundary changes and trying to look at what the impacts are for each of our schools.

One of those is Cascadia.

Cascadia now at Lincoln has 770 students and the new school that they will be moving into one year from now has 660 seats.

So we will be considering what the alternatives are.

Many I think parents as well as teachers want to know can't we just put portables at Cascadia in the new location and make do.

Our challenge that the board will hear on October 5 is that our highly capable enrollment is growing at about 8% per year.

So you do the math and they are already at 770, 110 over the capacity for the new school and they would grow by another 70 students by next year and they would grow by another 70 students the following year.

So facilities will be looking at alternatives and making some recommendations to the board soon.

I mentioned transportation standards and then the board on September 28 next Wednesday will explore some of the issues around 24 credits, the new state required graduation requirements.

Huh community engagement updates.

We've got a lot of those.

We have just recently had a community meeting with regard to Madrona.

Madrona is a K-8 but their 6-8 enrollment has been dwindling so there will be some recommendations to the school board forthcoming possibly about changing the grade span for Madrona in conjunction with the opening of Meany Middle School in the fall of 2017. The community engagement task force scheduled for last week has been rescheduled to September 26. On October 5 I mentioned we will have a committee of the whole board discussion around the advanced learning and highly capable programs.

Budget office is holding a variety of community engagement meetings.

The race and equity advisory committee is meeting tomorrow night.

No, I'm sorry.

The African American advisory is meeting tomorrow night.

The race and equity advisory committee is in the process of inviting others to join their work and that information is on our website and Bernardo Ruiz is the contact for that.

And let's see tomorrow I have the opportunity to meet with many of our community-based partners who come together several times a year to talk about what they're doing and learn more about what the district is doing and how we can partner together.

And on Friday city year will be kicking off, they've been in schools and working already, but they'll be pulling their members together, 80 plus of them.

You'll see them in schools in red jackets.

And so they're another one of our great community partners that support tutoring and that recognition of each and every one of our students in I believe 10 schools that they work in.

And then on September 9 the BEX oversight committee met and they have the next meeting coming up on October 14. One of our other partners is the city of Seattle and actually Director Patu and I are missing our meeting with the city today, their meeting as we speak.

I believe that because we were unable to attend they will have one, today was supposed to be the final meeting so hopefully they will have one more final meeting.

And they are zeroing in on a variety of recommendations and I think today they were looking at kind of a straw poll.

And the mayor is, I think the mayor's budget is due the end of September.

So the mayor has put funds into his budget.

I don't know how much.

But within the next few days he should be I believe announcing what he has in his budget going forward.

So as we had hoped.

There will be some support for at least some of the recommendations going forward on eliminating the opportunity gaps.

Earlier in the week there was a Seattle Times article on the partnership between the Seattle Housing Authority, Seattle Public Schools and the city.

And I was mentioned to Bailey Gatzert.

A lot of the I guess a lot of the students are being displaced out of Yesler Terrace that means that they aren't in the attendance area anymore and so the Seattle Housing Authority with support from the city has been trying to find temporary housing within the Bailey Gatzert area to allow I think it's 38 students to remain in that attendance area with that school and with the teachers and students that they know well.

Several of us, Director Peters, Director Patu, myself, Steven Nielsen, Dr. Herndon and others participated in the Seattle center revisioning at Seattle center a few days ago.

They are looking at the northeast quadrant which includes the stadium and our parking garage so everybody wants everything and there is not enough space so we will continue to to see what might be possible in that area.

We certainly need it for a stadium, we need the parking revenue, and we want to ideally put a high school there for replacing Queen Anne.

We also have been working on the joint use agreement with the parks and rec.

We have reached agreement on it.

We have kind of a bridge letter for the next couple of weeks and we are bringing that MOU to the ops meeting here in a few weeks.

And then finally with regard to homeless encampments the city council has been considering allowing homeless encampments on public land which so far include public schools.

And we recently worked through an issue with the city on kind of a very small group of homeless that were at Lowell.

We have concerns about where that legislation might be headed and have been expressing our opposition at least the way the issue is currently before the city council.

I'm getting there.

So start of school, kind of one headline that I put up last week and will say again is that this has been probably one of the biggest years of change in Seattle schools at the start of school in many many years.

We changed all of the bus schedules for the change in bell times.

We opened five new schools, we created 90 additional classrooms and portables, libraries, other places to accommodate smaller class size approved by the legislature and funded by the legislature.

We added all-day kindergarten for every student in the city for the first time and I'm probably missing a few other things that we did.

Given that magnitude of change the staff did an incredible job throughout the district and we know that had major impact on probably 250 of our teachers who had to box everything up, move that, move it into new classrooms and yeah we just had an awful lot of change We do our staffing based on enrollment that is how we get our funding from the state and that is how we allocate our staffing.

I suppose the good news and the challenging news is that we estimated an increase in enrollment of 800 students.

were somewhere between right on target and 200 students more than that.

And I know that sounds funny but as students come to school in the fall several things happen.

One is we count kids on the fourth day and if they haven't showed up by the fourth day we have to remove them from our roles.

Part of that is as it should be in that the state doesn't want to be paying for students that aren't here.

In some cases that means that if a family is on vacation and they just didn't come back by the fourth day that means that we don't get to count that student and we don't get money for that student at least for that month.

And so then our enrollment It starts low, it builds up over that 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th day, it goes up a little bit more by October, it might hold steady in November and then it starts to decline throughout the school year and that's what we get our money based on that we have to pay teacher salaries for for the entire year.

So that's what we've been doing over the last several days is trying to figure out okay how many students do we have districtwide and then how does that translate into how many students do we have at each individual school and how many staff members did we allocate and did we allocate enough staff members.

In the case of Loyal Heights, Loyal Heights had a very challenging pattern this year in that their kindergarten enrollment was up by 20 students which normally would trigger an additional staff member.

But enrollment in other grades were down by a similar amount.

So based on our funding formula, the first formula, they have the number of staff that they qualify for and they have the same number of staff that any school across the district would have with that enrollment.

They also have other challenges in that they are moving.

They have moved out of their building and they are at John Marshall and then due to the probably the staffing that I just described as well as maybe the K-3 staffing and the legislature's focus on making sure that class sizes at early grades are smaller.

It means that they have two or three split classrooms potentially going forward.

So we've heard a lot from Loyal Heights in terms of parents and teachers about the anxiety that that's causing and the stress that that's causing in conjunction with a move to a new school.

So, we are within a few days of looking at the numbers districtwide and the school board has set aside two potential pots of money for making adjustments after school starts based either on enrollment, specialized impacts or split classrooms.

So, with that as kind of a prologue, we've got three speakers to address the board tonight and so we'll hear first from Principal Floyd who will talk a little bit more about the unique issues at Loyal Heights and then we'll hear from John Halfacre who has spent some time with staff in the school and then we'll hear from Sherry Cox We will give a little bit more of an overview of what is happening at the district level and what possibilities might be there.

So thank you Dr. Nyland, directors, good evening.

So I was asked to come and kind of talk about how we got to this point right now.

So last spring we were originally projected to have 66 kindergartners and 90 showed up and at present time we have 87. So I requested an additional kindergarten teacher to accommodate that load and it was initially granted however as Dr. Nyland said we discovered that the fifth grade and the second grade numbers had dropped.

One was eight and one dropped by 10. And so based on those numbers we were you know just on that alone we didn't qualify for an extra teacher.

I would like to say that there are a lot of mitigating circumstances that Loyal Heights has faced over the last few years that should allow us to have that extra teacher to accommodate that K class without splits.

I won't go back three years but I will go back a couple.

So planning for the move to Marshall has been very disruptive to say the least.

It's taken a lot of time.

As you know at Beck's project it requires a lot of planning time, a lot of meetings, community issues that surrounded that were exciting at the least.

You know around school design, like I said all the meetings and what not.

Packing, moving at the end of the year, we lost our counselor, we lost a teacher.

We also had, we extended our special ed services so we took on a focus, so we now have focus access and resource room which is a really big change for Loyal Heights for our demographics and population.

We had to implement all school busing obviously because we moved to the John Marshall building so that is something new because we are a neighborhood school where everybody walks bikes or scooters or what have you or drives.

And moving into just the unfamiliar building of Marshall and getting it set up and running is basically like opening up a new school.

And all of those things and there's a few more but all of those things put together make one big tidal wave.

It's not like any of these one things in itself is going to sink you but there's just been a lot of things that we have gone through and so that's I understand that we don't qualify according to the formula but based on other mitigating and accentuating circumstances I would think Loyal Heights should qualify for a teacher for those 90 kindergartners.

Good evening Directors and Superintendent Nyland.

John Hafford Executive Director of Schools for the Northwest Region.

As Principal Floyd referenced and as you know from the budgeting process we began the process in February and even earlier than that in terms of the planning process but in February we projected that Loyal Heights would have 411 total students.

They currently have 413 total students so it's a difference of two students in there.

We did look at and the numbers did adjust to 418 in June but that still didn't trigger any additional staffing allocation at that time.

So if you look at it from that perspective we are actually about five students under what we projected.

But we are still within that zone where we would have expected to be.

The challenge that the school has faced in addition to the moves and other pieces that we've talked about and the acclimation to a new school community and all those pieces is that our kindergarten enrollment did come in significantly higher and that's fantastic.

That's what we want to see is our kindergartners growing.

But within that our second grade and our fifth grade numbers came in lower.

And the challenges on that because we moved through the process where other schools where they received their numbers early on were able to prepare for some of the things.

Loyal Heights was preparing for a move and packing and unpacking those kind of pieces and that's just kind of added to this challenge to suddenly realize even though you are up in one part of your school the other part of the school didn't come in as we expected.

Why didn't it come in?

We can't say right now.

It's traditionally a school that hits its targets almost on the nose.

and for a second and a fifth grade class to drop off like that for this school's pattern just didn't quite make sense.

It could have something to do with the move.

It could have something to do with other pieces.

We will investigate that as we dig a little bit further into this.

But that is kind of where we have been sitting at.

So I went out yesterday morning and had an opportunity to meet with the PTA president and other members of the school community.

I met with the staff in the morning.

I've been in constant communication with Wayne and his administrative team in his office on almost a daily basis.

Getting updates from them as school opened.

I had actually talked with Michael Tully about the opportunity if it was there if the kindergarten had actually come in to put a substitute into place as soon as the kindergarten numbers were known.

But it was on that same day that we were able to say but this didn't happen on this side.

And we just couldn't pull the trigger on that again in part because of what we remember from last year at this time.

Last year at this time we had pushed 18 temporary staff out based on this same kind of scenario and we ended up pulling them back and when we pulled them back in October because the numbers actually didn't show up as is the case here.

we all received a lot of pressure from all sorts of our community members to say this isn't the right way to do this.

And so we rebuilt the system based on input from the board, based on input from staff, based on input from the communities that tried to address better how we staff our schools and how we adjust to them.

And right now we are in that process.

I notified everybody yesterday as I talked with them, as I met with the PTA officers, as I met with community and the teaching staff that Next Monday is when the decisions will be finalized and staffing potentially will be moving to the schools that are impacted right now.

But we're a large system, a system that is based on equity and we use an equity toolkit to make our decisions and we're also based on recognition of other factors that can play into that and we're looking at those too.

And we just have to be very smart, very deliberate.

We can't react too quickly in case that we trigger something else that we didn't intend to and we're trying to be really deliberate this year.

That's a hard pressure.

on a school right now that as I said has essentially an extra kindergarten class stacked on top of the normal K classrooms right now.

So again Principal Floyd has been absolutely a superhero in all of this from the move and everything else that has gone on.

The team over at Loyal Heights unpacking, getting ready to go, greeting every kid, doing all the K interviews and everything else that went along with a brand-new process this year for our kindergartner teams.

They did a great job.

and we're all trying to support them and we will have something ready to discuss on Monday but the process right now is still kind of working its way through.

Sherry Cox is going to come up and share just a little bit more of that overall process so we all are clear on that too.

But again I want to thank the Loyal Heights team and specifically Principal Floyd for all the work that they've done on this.

We know it's been challenging and we are listening and trying to respond to them as quickly as we can.

Thanks John.

Good afternoon or evening directors and Dr. Nyland.

I'm Sherry Cox from school operations and just going to go over a high level of this entire staffing process.

Lots of questions have been coming in from community members as well as from you.

And we want to be sure that we are as clear as possible and I'm going to talk about a bunch of numbers but I want you to know that we know that these numbers are people's children and as a parent and a former principal of students in Seattle Public Schools they are not just numbers to us and we understand that these, when we pull staff or move staff around that this is impactful and it's personal at that point because they are somebody's kids.

So this staffing process starts, basically we are going to start preparing for 2017 probably after Monday's announcement goes out to schools about current staffing.

Central office, PASS and SEA come together, we review and we adjust the weighted staffing standards.

or you may hear it as called WSS.

We've done this yearly since I've started in Seattle Public Schools.

This team creates staffing targets or ratios based on the collective bargaining agreement and based on state funding for our K-12 classrooms.

It also determines the core staffing, our counselor allocations, our AP allocations, our free and reduced lunch allocations that goes out to school.

All of the information is then compiled for principals in what we call the gold book.

It is available online to anyone to look at and it talks about things like for example this year our first grade targets in order to receive the full funding from the state for a high poverty school.

We recommended that they be staffed at a 20 student to one ratio.

And it goes through and it does every grade level and it does high poverty versus non-high poverty schools.

So that comes out in December.

In February enrollment planning analyzes data from around the city.

They use birth rates, mobility rates, show rates and they determine a projection in February for the following October 1. The budget takes that number and it runs it through what we call the WSS formula and generates allocations for not just staffing but for what we call the core staffing and the other allocations.

That information goes out to principals at the end of February and they start working with their building leadership teams to build a master schedule.

In February through June this year we were generating communications to school leaders about the new state requirements in order for us to receive full funding in order for us to hit the K-3 targets.

We were following up with individual principals throughout this process.

Principals and the community received multiple communications from central office to help with this big change.

The same process that happened in February happens again in June where now that open enrollment had closed by June the enrollment planning office generates an updated projection for the following October.

Budget reruns the WSS formula.

At this time we decided in June that we were going to freeze core staffing because we didn't want to pull an assistant principal at one school and then come back in October or September 26 and have to replace it.

So we decided to hold the core staffing but we did allocate if necessary more teachers or we did pull teachers from the June staffing allocations.

Throughout August enrollment what we see happening is that we get more and more kids into our system but families are not as good at pulling their students out if they move and so our August enrollment is often our highest number because the data is not clean in some ways.

Starting on the first day of school though our enrollment planning team is pulling daily headcounts we call them of students at each grade level.

They are looking at those, they are sharing them with leaders in the district.

We are looking to see are there outliers, are there big questions that we have, are we way off our projections and really doing investigating at that point.

It takes time to clean up the data.

We have I can tell you from a school level we've got the registrars out there calling families that haven't showed up saying are you coming are you coming because we want to make sure that our day four data which is the data that the state uses to fund us for the month of September is as accurate as possible.

The reason that we waited until day seven to do our analysis for staffing allocations is because remember our kindergartners had a three-day delay start.

So our day four was actually the first day for kindergartners so we wanted an opportunity to make sure that our K-12 data was as clean and accurate as possible.

The budget is currently right now rerunning the WSS based on actual headcounts.

We are looking to ensure that we have hit the K-3 staffing ratios so that we can receive the full funding from the state.

And then we will take a look.

We are going to have a big chunk of the data probably starting tomorrow to look at where are areas of need, where do we want to reduce the impact.

We have a limited amount of funds set aside as you know.

Our goal is to reduce the impact on schools where we may need to In the past we would have pulled a teacher out of that school.

We are hoping to not have to do that.

We want to try to minimize the number of splits.

We knew that hitting the K-3 targets may have caused an increased number of splits and I think it's not as bad as at least I was fearing.

We have about 10 more splits in our K-5 and our K-8 schools than we did last year.

So not a significant increase.

On Monday principals will know what decisions were made and staffing allocation decisions will be communicated to all schools.

Thank you very much.

I would say that we have two pots of money set aside.

The school board set aside $2 million to avoid what we did last year which was pull teachers back so that would be schools that are under enrolled.

We obviously have to look at schools that are over enrolled that have more students and therefore expect more staff and then as Sherry indicated we had a pot of money set aside to minimize the number of splits so it was kind of like if a school had more than two split classrooms we would look at that.

I guess the good news for this year compared to last year, last year we missed our enrollment target.

I forget 700 students.

I think we were 700 students below.

what we had budgeted and so that didn't give us any leeway for staffing.

This year we have much better news in that we know that we have at least hit our budget target and may have a little bit more enrollment than that.

So as Sherry said we will be looking at that Thursday and Friday and getting that announcement out on Monday.

Any questions?

I have a question for Principal Floyd.

If you are not allocated another teacher, what ramifications will that have for your school?

So we would have to reconfigure pretty much the entire grades.

So we would have splits across several grades, three to four splits.

We have one currently.

So you have one currently and you would end up with three or four.

Correct.

Thank you.

And it is my understanding that three or four automatically triggers mediation or mitigation as a result of the money that has been put aside for splits.

So there is a potential that hearing the answer on Monday that is not a favorable answer automatically triggers potentially some mitigation funds coming towards your school that could be used.

Yeah I mean that's what we will do in the next few days and then we would announce that on Monday.

All right a few more remarks and then I'll end.

So good news Rainier Beach was one of 20 schools across the country to be named school of opportunity by the National Education Policy Center.

We'll invite them to a future board meeting.

The office of international education, we welcomed eight international visiting teachers from China, Japan and Spain this year.

Advanced learning process, they've made some updates to their online referral form and publishing their information for parents in seven languages and publishing it on Facebook, Twitter and in the principal communicator.

Special education has updated their website trying to increase their access and transparency and they have again pulled together special education parent partners to support families as we work through this coming year.

And the media operations center is now captioning all of our school board meetings on YouTube.

So you can get a voiceover on our school board meetings on YouTube.

That's part of our compliance work and makes our meetings more accessible.

So thank you.

Thank you.

Again I would like to welcome Kanati Kennedy Hairston from Franklin high school.

Kanati is a junior at Franklin, an honor student and a very active athlete and ASB member.

So we are going to hear from her.

Thank you.

I'm Kennedy.

And first of all I would like to thank the school board for Franklin was painted last year inside and it actually really helped we believe.

It looks beautiful.

They also came and fixed the exterior of our school, washed it and made our school feel very fresh and renewed.

We want to thank you also for working with the Metro to make sure that the students could have Orca cards even if they lived within two miles of the school because getting to school is hard no matter what.

And thank you for working to improve the participation fees.

It really makes a difference for the students who can afford it which is a lot of the students at Franklin.

And also thank you for inviting us here.

Franklin is a very very amazing school.

A lot of the things that happen here are Our AP calculus scores are some of the best in the city and as an AP calculus student I feel very proud in knowing that like my teachers are working extremely hard to make it all run smoothly.

Our diversity is strong.

You notice it the minute you walk into Franklin that there's so many different cultures.

We know how to be together and understand one another's cultures, collaborate and border cross.

We have African-American students in the Pacific Islander club or the lion dance club and it all just helps everybody understand each other.

We cultivate differences and seek possibilities to work together.

We love each other and it's something that our principal constantly has us reiterate we just love each other and we are a community.

and our graduation rates are improving and constantly improving and we have so many first-time college students and first-generation graduates and seeing them walk across the stage is very gratifying to see that.

We are social justice warriors every day we are constantly trying to combat the injustices in our school and in the world and we are striving to just make Seattle a greater place.

We have an amazing feminist union who degendered our graduation and worked with the ASB to change how we handle the dress code violations.

to make it more equal and fair and our amazing Muslim student association who coordinates our multicultural night but also combats the anti-Islamism that is happening in the world and sometimes even in the school but every time they are coming in and they are making it work and they are doing the best they can which is amazing.

We love the community around Franklin too.

We build tiny homes for the homeless, just students everywhere because we don't want people to experience homelessness and it's a real problem.

And our blood drives are really successful.

We get all students eligible to do it because they know that they are making a difference and our key club just are rock stars with it.

They help it constantly.

But there are concerns around Franklin that we would like to address and we want to honor our Muslim students even more and considering them for free and reduced lunch during Ramadan because if a student is on free and reduced lunch they should be able to take home a boxed lunch so that they can eat when they break their fast which would help exponentially because they don't eat during the day.

So it would be really, it's a real struggle a lot of the times.

And also in summer school Eid is not an excused absence which we want to make sure that all religious holidays are recognized and count as excused absences to help the students in their learning and make them feel accounted for and recognized.

increased transportation costs.

We are supposed to be competing with everyone in the Metro League but it's problematic when wealthier schools can absorb the increased costs to say buy charter buses to go to sports by asking parents for more money and we can't because a lot of our parents have four jobs and they are just trying to keep the household stable and more than half of our school is on free and reduced lunch so asking our parents to like put in more money is quite difficult.

There is like an equity issue and we all want to play but we want to be competitive and not send our band on Metro and light rail which happened last week we had our band take the Metro and the bus to Memorial Stadium because we couldn't for the buses to send them they walked from Westlake all the way to Memorial Stadium and we don't want that to happen because it's a safety issue having them carry their tubas and snare drums, flutes and trombones all the way there.

We don't want them getting hurt.

And it's also a safety issue because we have to send buses at like 1230 to one so students are not only missing like one class but two classes and this is a safety issue because some coaches have jobs and can't meet them that early or travel with them and it creates this whole dynamic that's really unsafe for the students who are traveling.

And then also many schools in the district offset their ASB fundraising with support from the PTSA and as I said before a lot of our parents have jobs that need to keep their households stable or just don't have the time because they have other priorities.

And at Franklin high school we have to do our own fundraising and not everyone can afford to go to the trainings and not everyone can afford to go to the ASB workshops.

We wanted to know like is it possible for the district to coordinate an annual training for all ASB and advisors and officers to make sure we all know how to follow the rules because we think it's an important thing where we want like the auditor to come in and see that like we have all of our stuff together.

and make it and make it really easy for them and really easy for us.

Thank you.

Thank you very much Kanati.

Really appreciate having you here.

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

May I have a motion for the consent agenda?

I move that we accept the consent agenda.

Second.

Approval of the consent agenda has been moved and second.

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

Seeing none, all those in favor of the consent agenda signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Those opposed.

Consent agenda has passed.

Now we are into our time for our testimony.

We have reached the public testimony portion of the agenda.

It is now 5.33.

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 the personnel, individually named staff.

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

When the two minutes have ended please conclude your remarks.

Ms. Ritchie will read off the testimony of speakers.

of Gracie Brown, David Sandler and Chris Jackins.

Hi my name is Gracie Brown and I am a senior at Franklin High School.

I would like to talk about some of the concerns that Kennedy brought up.

I am the co-chair of our student athletic advisory council.

And we had a meeting last year with representatives from all the schools where we talked about the problems that are in our athletics.

I listened to schools that are just north of us complain about how reffing is one of our biggest problems and make statements that made it very clear that they didn't understand how these systems are run.

And then I listened to Franklin talk about the problems that we face which were funding and transportation and funding for new equipment.

This meeting made it very clear to me and to a lot of the other students that there is inequity in our athletics.

There is inequity in the problems that we are facing and there is major inequity in our outside funding.

There is also inequity between our wealthy schools and our not so wealthy schools.

Franklin has to compete with schools that have students that don't understand how these systems work and how outside funding works.

The students don't understand because the system works for them.

But that is not something that we can say at Franklin High School because our needs are not being met.

Frisbee understands the difference.

Franklin Frisbee understands the difference between a club sport and a normal sport because Franklin cannot afford to provide jerseys or coaches or transportation for them.

Cheer understands.

the how the increase in bus prices affects them because they don't get transportation to a single football game this season.

Everyone receives the same funding but our PTSA and booster clubs cannot offset the cost like other schools can.

And this is where we see the inequity.

Thank you.

Thank you.

My name is David Sandler this is my 11th year as a physical therapist assistant with Seattle Public Schools.

Good evening board directors, superintendents and members of the ever-expanding cabinet.

Soon we will need two tables, two tiers of tables and a spiral staircase to accommodate you.

There is a line in Sly and the Family Stone's song Stand that states there is a permanent crease in your right and wrong.

One such crease is in the past contract under consideration tonight.

Hopefully the board will iron it out.

Page 14 paragraph 2 of the current pass contract describes a balanced scorecard bonus wherein two of the five components use growth or performance on statewide assessments or tests as indicators.

In plain language this is extra pay for a rise in test scores.

Is this the reason principals allow libraries to become test taking factories for weeks on end every year?

At my junior high in Brooklyn in 1970, we would have referred to this bonus as a $7,500 a year hustle.

Erin Jones who won the recent primary for superintendent of public instruction by 22% stated last year at a meeting of the Seattle special ed PTSA that online standardized testing measured primarily the test takers exposure to technology.

Principals are already paid 250% more than a first-year teacher and even more multiples than a first-year IA.

No bonus is needed.

SPS should be using that money to hire more counselors and to fund building-based equity teams initiatives that would accelerate the superintendent's purported push toward a relationship-based model of public education.

What about providing more recess, ensuring that every student has a chair and a desk that fit them and sign a statement, pass members sign a statement that condemns our war-based economy.

Thank you.

Thank you.

After Mr. Jackins we will have Kimberly McCormick, Janine Dodd and Melissa Taylor.

My name is Chris Jackins Box 84063 Seattle 98124. On the Magnolia educational specifications two points.

Number one the Magnolia ed specs should be delayed until November as the use of the school may change to address racial imbalance issues.

Number two the plans would shrink the Magnolia playground which is what happened at Loyal Heights.

I have a diagram from the district attached.

Please vote no.

On the resolution for school board support of federal recognition of the Duwamish nation to be considered on October 12. Four points.

I very much support the resolution.

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 district produced a report on the Magnolia Elementary School project.

The district's own report references the importance of the Duwamish Nation.

Here are some excerpts from the report.

Magnolia Elementary School is in the ethnographic territory of the Duwamish.

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

Today descendants continue to seek independent federal tribal status for the Duwamish.

Number four please do not water down the resolution in support of federal recognition of the Duwamish nation.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Kimberly McCormick.

Janine Dodge.

Melissa Taylor.

Hello Melissa Taylor parent to an Olympic View second grader.

I'm here to talk about grandfathering but I would like to first express my unwavering support of the Garfield students choice to kneel at their football game and of your support of them.

Please continue it and let us know how we can support you.

In regards to grandfathering I am here on behalf of my daughter, her school community and all of the other school communities that will be impacted by the recommendations for extremely limited grandfathering in the North End.

We are shocked and appalled by the decision and by its rollout.

A group of us met this weekend and we believe that if this goes forward it will result in almost 50% of Olympic View families being forced to move to Olympic Hills and Sacajawea midstream in their elementary years.

In addition to those families the ones left at Olympic View will be forced to completely rebuild the PTA, the volunteer efforts and family engagement relationships in communities that are so crucial to ensuring an effective school environment.

Further we believe this policy will disproportionately impact our ELL and FRL families many of whom are unaware of the grandfathering policy and its impact on them.

This directly undermines our district's efforts at equity.

We would like to understand what emergency calls for undermining the general and expected practice of grandfathering that would have allowed our community to make the boundary adjustment gradually and thoughtfully.

Looking at a map it looks like a massive shell game to accelerate the population of Cedar Park and we do not understand why it cannot be phased and why if it couldn't be phased our communities were not engaged earlier.

I can tell you that my family and many other families in area 93 would likely have made different enrollment decisions had we known that this was a possible outcome.

My daughter is just finally feeling settled and connected and it breaks my heart to think of starting that process all over again.

The Olympic View school community is planning to facilitate a community discussion next Monday September 26. We invite any of you that can attend.

The rest of my comments are in here as well as questions and data we would like answers to.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Adrienne Key, Adarin sorry, Jonathan Hoekert, and Frank Swart.

Hi my name is Darren I am a student at Loyal Heights Elementary School.

Right now we are currently in a remodel in Green Lake.

Our school needs to get a new kindergarten teacher because each class has around 30 students.

Ms. Lipsy actually last time she talked to the school board about this they made her cry.

It's not fair that like a lot of the school kids are going to have to like move into different classes just because the school board wouldn't give us a teacher.

We just started, it would be hard for them because we just started a new school year we moved to a different school it's a new school teacher already and then another one would just be way confusing.

Our schools have been learning, have already learned like a lot, like I learned a lot of math, a lot of things and then we made a lot of new friends and we don't want to have to like lose our teacher that we have right now.

That would be really confusing and it wouldn't be fair.

So we just need one more teacher.

Thank you.

Good afternoon school board.

Thank you for hearing me today.

My name is John Hokut and my daughter Vivian is one of the 88 kindergarten students at Loyal Heights Elementary.

Currently there are 31 students in her classroom with Mrs. Lepsey.

With 88 kindergarten students in three small classrooms we all know we need a fourth kindergarten class immediately.

We need the search for a new permanent kindergarten teacher to start immediately with urgency.

We need an inspiring teacher who is dying to teach kindergarten.

You see Vivian has been chosen by lottery to be one of the students who will be moved to the fourth kindergarten classroom.

And if she is going to be moved away from Mrs. Lepsey the replacement needs to be someone who really wants to be her teacher.

This will be hard for the whole school, well especially for the teacher to start teaching a kindergarten class several weeks into the year without any advance time to prep a lesson plan.

The teacher will need the help, support and collaboration of the entire school.

It will be hard but this is the sort of stress a healthy school like ours with a strong PTA and plenty of volunteers can absorb.

And that is why it has to be a new teacher.

The scheme to use an existing teacher and shift students between every class and create multiple mixed grade classes without supplying the advanced planning and resources such classes require will consume all possible extra time of every teacher in the school.

and there will be nobody with time to spare for Vivian's teacher.

A teacher who spent the summer making plans to teach a different grade, who spent the last weeks falling in love with his or her current students and whose students already love them back.

That's just not fair.

We need a new kindergarten teacher.

Hello I'm Frank Swart and I'm here to ask that you not shrink Loyal Heights by one classroom this year.

Prior to the first day of school the plan was for 17 teachers and now two weeks later the district is proposing still 17 teachers but with a massive shifting throughout all grades.

please investigate.

But I'd like to take a step back to my favorite topic.

The debate is about whether to shrink Loyal Heights from 18 to 17 classrooms this year.

And this is just months before you break ground on a 41 classroom mega school costing $44 million.

Now I understand that capital and operating funds are separate but don't you see the irony in spending $44 million for an oversized school when we are struggling to keep just 18 classrooms open this year?

The next levy should allocate less to unneeded mega school construction and more to teachers.

This dispute is about reducing kindergarten class size to 22 as recommended by the state.

So why is the new school being built with rooms sized large enough to hold 30 students using district standards and really for 34 students using OSPI standards.

The district seems to believe that a huge school with a tiny playground will improve education.

But this crowd didn't descend upon you when we were in portables.

Their priorities are right, the students need teachers not an understaffed palace.

A lesson learned, busing is awful.

Parent support, volunteerism and the community are hampered because of the remoteness of this temporary school.

We will deal with it just as other schools have but when the new school opens 30% of the students will live outside the walk zone up to 1.8 miles away.

Their education and community will suffer and not just for two years.

Finally, if we really are close to the enrollment threshold I say have mercy on the kids.

They are enduring cross-down bus rides of 30 to 45 minutes often longer and are often late for school.

If only to compensate for that hardship please fund the additional teacher.

Thank you.

Our next three speakers will be Kendall Kruver, Julie Giebel and Elsa Kunz.

Hi I'm Kendall Kruver.

I'm the mom of two students at Loyal Heights Elementary and I'm here to talk about the student overflow in the kindergarten classrooms.

I know the state is failing us when it comes to funding public education and that the district is working with limited funds.

A budget, regulations and the like are all important tools in dealing with sparse resources.

But these are only tools and sometimes a situation requires you to set them aside.

The entire school community is at stake here and it will not be worth it to play by the rules this time.

You don't start talking about regulations when the flood is rising.

You use your common sense and you get to higher ground.

It is clear that hiring a new kindergarten teacher would cause the least amount of upheaval among students and teachers.

It is the most direct path to helping everyone to adjust to the new building and school year.

I know the district is making careful plans for its resources but life doesn't pay attention to plans.

Children and teachers are not chess pieces to be moved around without consequences.

When faced with a difficult situation, remaining rigid is the pathway to disaster.

Though you may not think you can bend anymore, right now it is of great importance that you do.

Please find a sub immediately so that these students can adjust to their first year of school life.

Please hire a kindergarten teacher as soon as possible so that this school can begin to move on.

I'm asking you to demonstrate strong leadership, show us your commitment to doing right by our kids and show us your support to these teachers who give everything to provide a good education for their students.

Thank you.

Hello my name is Julie Giebel I am the mother of two boys at Loyal Heights Elementary and the president of the PTA.

Thank you for hearing our testimony and taking action today.

I have come to ask you to look into the flawed weighted staffing system that would allow for a complete upending of our school or any school for that matter in place of a less rigid and more practical solution.

Specifically, I implore you to compel the district to provide us a new kindergarten teacher and also ask that you review and set limits to the extent to which adjustments can be made to any school after the start of the school year.

Loyal Heights is one of the least funded elementary schools in the district.

We receive roughly $2,000 less per student than the average elementary.

And I completely agree with the philosophy of funding toward equity and appreciate that extra funds are freed up for schools in need.

But what this means to a school like ours is that we operate with the bare minimum of personnel possible.

We do not have a single body to spare.

Indeed there are many many gaps that if not filled by our community I argue would result in substantially lower educational outcomes.

In spite of our low funding Loyal Heights carries a tradition as an award-winning school and continues to be one of the top elementary schools in the district and the state.

We as a community pull ourselves up and fill the gaps.

As such we provide great value for the district.

We are not a community of complainers but we prefer to solve our problems however we are in a unique situation and require your help today.

All of us can relate to moving a household and the many things that can and do go wrong and the challenges that result.

While it is no different in moving an entire school only in this case we can multiply the number of factors and logistical headaches times at least 413 students.

Our move is also compounded by the addition of two new special education programs and an entire community that is busing on all new bus routes.

We are handling the transition but we need your help.

It only takes one more teacher.

Thank you.

Thank you.

After Ms. Kunz we will have Laura Burke, Brian Jones and Heather Muero.

Good evening.

How about that?

Sorry.

Thanks for hearing us this evening.

My name is Elsa Kunz.

I am a parent of a fifth grader at Loyal Heights Elementary School and I live within 500 feet of the gigantic mega school that Frank so eloquently stated earlier.

My now fifth grader when she was in kindergarten the first time we stepped into her classroom she turned towards me overwhelmed and cried.

It was Ms. Colwell her kindergarten teacher who was there to support her.

My older student who is now an eighth grader when she was at Loyal Heights elementary school she was identified as needing additional support.

It was our Loyal Heights community teachers staff who supported her through this and what she needed.

We all know and have heard this evening that our, sorry, our Washington state is not properly funding our K-12 education.

I could quote you the McCleary case, the initiative 1351, our own Randy Dorn or the task force.

These measures are all put in place to increase our funding for Washington state.

But we are not here and not asking the Seattle School Board to do the legislature's job this evening.

We are here to ask for your partnership in our community.

We understand that there is additional funds at the district's disposal to help meet our kids' needs.

If you do not approve the additional kindergarten teacher that Loyal Heights Elementary School is requesting we will have at least three times the number of split classrooms this year as last year.

The consequences to our kids will be further disruption three weeks into the school year or more, parting with newly created friends, adjusting to new teaching styles and starting over again with a teacher who needs to learn all their challenges, strengths and what motivates them to want to learn.

Consequences to our teachers will be three weeks they just spent learning about their current student strengths, opportunities and needs to occur all over again with a new set of students.

They will have to overhaul their current curriculum to account for two grade levels of learning, re-evaluate and assign groups in reading, writing and math to meet the students' needs.

We are asking for your support in our community.

Please do not make it harder for our teachers to give quality instruction to our students at an already hectic beginning to the interim location at John Marshall.

Thank you.

Hi my name is Laura Burke and I'm here representing the nine elementary schools and three K-8s that have been left behind with the tier 3 bell time.

We were all excited about the proposed bell time flip as it not only aligned with the natural biorhythms of upper grade students but it optimized learning for younger kids too.

The district concluded this was best for all learners and received national recognition for making this very positive decision.

But little attention was paid to the fact that not all learners were included in this move.

Why were 12 schools left behind?

To avoid a one time 8% increase in transportation costs.

Or were those really the costs?

How are those 12 schools handpicked to stay in tier 3?

Some presumptions may have been made about families' abilities to afford pre and post school childcare.

No matter the out-of-pocket expense the real price is paid by the children left behind in these schools.

This year 85% of our elementary school learners start learning in their classrooms at 8am.

Our kids don't start in their classroom seats until 940 AM.

That's nearly a two-hour difference between the start and end times for the majority of our elementary school students.

Is that equal?

I'm not even getting into the disruption this dichotomy creates for families and teachers in a community where neighbors have dramatically different routines.

I also think there's a difference departing school at 405 versus 225 once you add the previously agreed 220 minutes to the school day.

Which do you think gives your child more time to play in the daylight, recoup from school, do homework, eat a healthy dinner and wind down for bedtime?

Tier 3 bell times also make it extremely difficult for special ed students needing extra support, occupational, physical, emotional therapies to get to appointments before the end of the business day.

I don't think optimal learning times should be a cost issue for the district, a family affordability issue or even an equitable issue.

This is an issue of giving all our students the same healthy safe optimal learning schedule.

Fiscal prudence is important but so is providing the best conditions for learning and if you have already deemed this best for our kids the school board must finish the job and have a standard schedule across elementary schools, across K-8, across middle schools and across high schools.

Please use some of the 11 million underspend from last year to include the families teachers and kids from 12 schools not isolate them in tier 3. Thank you.

Thank you.

Brian Jones.

Mr. Pinkham you've heard a number of serious concerns from the parents and staff at Loyal Heights and I want to thank you for meeting with us this week, earlier this week.

I think we can all agree that children and teachers should not be moved around after three weeks of school.

Loyal Heights issues are just a small microcosm of what is happening across this district.

We can do better.

The legendary superintendent that this building is named after John Stanford did better.

When he took over the Seattle Public Schools he criticized the system for having an inward kind of thinking that was more concerned about the comfort of the people who run the system than the public it was supposed to serve.

He decided that the district should be run like a business.

His words warned that poor customer service by staff should be punishable by firing.

Harsh words but it must have worked because he is a Seattle educational icon.

I believe that John Stanford would be embarrassed by what is happening today to this district.

If we are honest some of the symptoms we are seeing here today are identical to the problems he saw in his time.

And as a result many of us have lost total faith in the district.

I ask that as our elected school board officials you powerfully exert the authority the citizens have entrusted you with Understand this district is hampered by severe bureaucratic inefficiencies and cannot continue to function in this manner.

If it was run like a business, which John Stanford did, there would be consequences for those who have led us to this point.

And who are the customers being shortchanged?

Our children.

We are entrusting our faith in all of you, the school board.

to fix the broken system.

Thank you.

After Ms. Muero we will have Sadie Agurkis, Michal Gilch, and Chad Smith.

Good evening my name is Heather Muero and I'm the parent of a fourth grade student at Loyal Heights Elementary.

I'm a single mother raising my multiracial daughter in a multigenerational household.

What that really means is I'm a native Seattleite and a product of Seattle Public Schools Franklin high school class of 1995. I worked my way through college and law school as a single parent and served my country as a Peace Corps volunteer and I now work in public service.

I'm here because I'm profoundly concerned about staffing issues at Loyal Heights and the proposed solution to that issue.

The proposal my understanding of it that's currently on the table to resolve the overly full kindergarten classes is to force a teacher already assigned to grades 1-5 to teach kindergarten which would then ripple across the whole school with a reshuffling of every classroom into split grades.

This solution is a terrible idea and will negatively impact the entire school including my daughter.

Forcing every teacher to prepare and adequately teach curriculum to two different grade levels on a whim is going to take away from classroom hours for my daughter.

Her teacher has not had time to prepare or strategize how to teach a split class and expecting them to do so after the school year has started is unacceptable.

My daughter is a great kid who sometimes struggles with loving school.

She's had amazing teachers at Loyal Heights who have worked very hard to help her love school.

Potentially changing her teacher at this stage and also putting her in a split class is going to do nothing but devastate her and take away time in class focused on fourth grade curriculum that she desperately needs.

She needs all the help she can get on a daily basis and I cannot even begin to imagine how she will get an adequate education if she is in a class where the teacher has to split the focus to educate two different grade levels of children.

All those kids are going to be losing educational time that they all need and are entitled to.

I'm begging you on behalf of my daughter to do the right thing and hire a fourth kindergarten teacher at Loyal Heights.

Thank you.

I'm Sadia Gurkis and I yield my time to Suzanne Granger.

Hi, a little nervous not going to lie.

So students, teachers and families from Loyal Heights have been through so much change since the beginning of the school year.

It has been far far from an ideal start to anyone's school year.

The temporary building has been really extraordinary stressful for us all.

And you know I just want to say I do understand that there are many other schools in situations that have high numbers and need new teachers and I really do also understand that the district is underfunded.

But what I really want to convey today is that Loyal Heights currently at John Marshall is in dire need of a new teacher.

The students of Loyal Heights have experienced enough change and upheaval in the past two weeks that we have been in school.

I'm going to outline a couple right now.

Number one, students have been moved away from their familiar small neighborhood school.

Up until this year students have lived within walking distance with no busing.

Students are now being bused across town to and from school frequently arriving late.

They are in a new building that is certainly not ideal for an elementary education including a subpar playground with little to no equipment and space to run.

This is an unsafe setting for children and I personally have found hypodermic needles, human feces and witnessed drug deals happening on campus at this location causing me to call 911 multiple times after school.

Because of this relocation it has been really difficult for parents involved in the community to make it safe and to make it a great learning environment that we have in the past.

This is due to travel time, the location, traffic in Seattle and busing.

We have finally, finally started to settle in and now there is a threat to change and move students away and to split classrooms schoolwide.

They have had anything but stability this year and to ask this.

Please conclude your remarks.

It's incomprehensible.

I am a parent of two, a full-time teacher of 16 years and I do understand that kids are resilient but we have hit the breaking point and we really have reached it.

I am asking you fund one more teacher please do not make more change for them.

Thank you.

Hi my name is Mikkel Gilgee.

I am a Loyal Heights parent of a fourth grader and a first grader.

I just want to say thank you so much for hearing all of us speak today.

Having split level classes is a philosophy, a teaching philosophy.

Teachers are trained and they tailor their instruction to this philosophy.

In order to successfully have split level classes at a school teachers need to be given time to plan accordingly.

They need to work through their curriculum and have the right training to be able to appropriately work with multiple grade levels in one class.

Creating split level classes as a knee jerk reaction due to poor planning by the district is not a philosophy.

It is not done to best serve our students.

Loyal Heights was told they would receive an additional kindergarten teacher if our kindergarten classes were overcrowded.

Those kindergartners showed up and Seattle Public Schools did not hire the teacher they said they would.

You cannot sit here and tell us after the school year has started it makes sense to make teachers and students change to split level classes across the school.

Teachers do not have the time to plan and train for this.

Our students are not numbers to be plugged into your matrix.

Loyal Heights is already one of the lowest funded schools in the district.

Parents are forced every year to come up with the funds to provide the necessary teachers and staff members for our school because the district will not provide them.

One of the school board's core beliefs is that it is essential to place the interest of the students above all others in every decision you make.

If you are truly committed to your core belief of putting the students first then make this simple decision and hire a kindergarten teacher for Loyal Heights Elementary.

Thank you.

Good afternoon my name is Chad Smith and my wife and I are the proud students of two boys attending Loyal Heights Elementary School.

I serve as the legislative and advocacy chair for our PTA and more importantly at least to the kids I also serve as the coordinator for popcorn Fridays.

I want to thank each of you for taking the time to listen to us today.

When you adopted the 2015-2016 budget you expressed the following as a core value.

We believe it is essential to place the interest of the students above all others in every decision we make.

You've heard that a couple of times today.

It remains true.

As you've heard the current kindergarten population at Loyal Heights exceeds original projections.

I'm not going to rehash that but it seems self-evident that you do not solve one problem by making many others.

Instead one analyzes the specific facts and circumstances and develops a sensible solution that addresses the discrete and specific issue at hand.

But that's not what is happening here because the district's staffing policy is broken.

Your own personnel acknowledged this fact earlier.

For starters the policy seems to require a rigid adherence to a one size fits all protocol without any apparent discretion to account for extraordinary circumstances such as those being experienced by Loyal Heights.

Such an approach offends all of our families because it essentially says too bad, we don't care, suck it up.

A better approach exists and I support any and all efforts that your personnel to find it.

Inevitably proponents of sticking with the status quo policy will offer up the tried and true we don't have the money.

Respectfully if district personnel can find a 16% budget increase for central administration they can find the dollars to pay for a kindergarten teacher at Loyal Heights.

You just have to want to.

Each of you ran for the school board in order to make a meaningful difference in the lives of our children, my children.

This is your chance.

Please do the right thing by our children and authorize and direct the hiring of a new teacher at Loyal Heights.

Thank you.

Catherine Gaffney, Aja Puckett, Shailene Rathkoff.

My name is Catherine Gaffney I am a third grade teacher at Loyal Heights Elementary and I would like to read to you a letter that was composed by the entire staff of our school and we will be presenting the original signed by our teachers to Dr. Nyland.

Dear Dr. Nyland, we are writing on behalf of all of our students at Loyal Heights Elementary.

Your potential decision to not hire another classroom teacher for our growing classrooms is not in the best interest of our students.

This decision will have negative effects on our students, their families and the staff.

Our principal Wayne Floyd has spent his time here at Loyal Heights creating a community of collaboration, trust and kindness among all the students and the staff.

A decision like this creates uneasiness among families and staff.

The staff at Loyal Heights has worked very hard to create a welcoming environment to our interim school John Marshall.

We have assured our families their children will continue to be safe and their needs will be met while being in this new space, a school not in their neighborhood.

All of the staff have put in countless hours, many unpaid, making sure students feel welcome and safe.

Parents and volunteers have also put in many hours helping teachers and students, especially with the buses and other new systems that are being put in place.

All of these changes although manageable have had an effect on our students, families and staff.

To then hear from our principal that our district will not only withhold another classroom teacher but will also force us all to make major changes in our current assignments weeks into the school year has created immediate stress and anxiety among all of us.

I'd also like to add that although our fifth grade count may be down those classrooms still have 26 students in each of them.

We do not understand how this could possibly be the best decision to meet the needs of all of our students.

This decision will disrupt our entire community, the general education population, our focus and access students, the ALO students, our resource service students, our staff and their families in addition to the Loyal Heights families.

Please consider our students, families and your staff and our staff.

We look forward to hearing from you sincerely, the Loyal Heights staff.

Thank you.

Hi I'm Kaisa Puckett and thanks to 30,000 Canadians I had the joy of running here from Pioneer Square.

So excuse my red face and sweaty brow but I'm here today as a parent of Loyal Heights Elementary and I'm here to demand that we have a kindergarten teacher for our overcrowded classes.

I want you to take serious consideration of the overcrowding and the safety concerns that we have at our new venue John Marshall.

What you propose to take care of the overcrowding just is not, it's not a feasible solution.

We can't completely disrupt the teachers, the students and the entire administration of Loyal Heights Elementary because one staff member cannot be added.

I know there's a rainy day fund that can be allocated.

You can find the 16% budget increase for this year.

Can we dive a little bit deeper to find more?

Furthermore if we did the splits across all of the throughout the school we would be creating a more chaotic environment on top of the already tumultuous start to school they've already had with busing issues, safety concerns and an overall turnaround of their normal day life.

Please don't make all of the students and all of the teachers and administrators at Loyal Heights shoulder the concern and the consequences for a failed enrollment process.

I know that there is a better solution to this and I urge you to look at the entire process and how we can fix that so this doesn't continually happen so that students and teachers across the district aren't shouldering the issues and the consequences.

I'd like you to take a deep look at this issue moving forward and start with adding the kindergarten teacher for Loyal Heights.

Thank you.

Good evening my name is Chalene Rathkopf.

I have two kids in Seattle Public Schools.

My son is 11 and attends Whitman middle school and my daughter is 7 and attends Loyal Heights.

I'm here tonight to address the overcrowding kindergarten classroom situation at Loyal Heights.

With your decision to build a mega school on the side of Loyal Heights we've been moved to John Marshall.

This move has impacted our community immensely.

SPS prides itself on neighborhood schools but you've asked our community to send our kids outside our neighborhood for two years.

That's a lot.

And now you are asking us to just deal with the district's miscalculation of enrollment figures at this new location.

This is not fair.

There are too many kids in the kindergarten classrooms.

Period.

We need another teacher.

Just one more.

Your solution to the problem is to split classrooms that will cause a ripple effect through our entire community.

Please reconsider this.

Your solution just creates new problems for us.

And right now we don't need any more problems and we don't need any more change.

We've been through enough.

You will need to hire more teachers when the new mega school is complete so please do it now because the need is now.

Show us that you recognize the sacrifice we are making as a community to make way for your mega school in Ballard.

We just need one more teacher, just one.

A teacher who is paid for by the district, not out of PTA funds, not by private donors but by the district.

We aren't asking for a specialist.

We are asking for basic education that is the foundation of the public school system.

Please don't fail to provide this in Seattle.

Thank you very much for your time and your consideration.

Thank you.

Katrina Huck.

Christine Nangel.

Andrea Morrison.

Hi my name is Katrina Hupp and I am the parent of a kindergartner and a third grader at Loyal Heights Elementary School.

We are not here tonight in a fight against split class sizes or even smaller class sizes.

We have a split classroom and it works well because we planned for it.

The issue is the district's proposed solution this late in the game.

Pulling a teacher from grades 1-5 to teach our overcrowded kindergarten children is a disruption to our entire student body.

The formula actually we respect your procedures and standards but it seems like the formula you are using does not take into account the real outcome and consequences of not getting this one additional teacher.

The absence of this one teacher equals a disrupted education of 412 children.

Just because we are a high-performing school doesn't mean we don't need your help.

We hope that a computer algorithm when calculating this decision isn't the only deciding factor for our situation.

Seattle Public Schools one salary is a very small investment in the future of 412 children.

Please help us.

Thank you.

Good evening my name is Andrea Glemish Morrison.

As a parent of a first grader I can really only speak to limited experience at Loyal Heights Elementary.

However last year's school experience was nothing short of exceptional for us and for our son Jack.

Ms. Caldwell was a shining example of the level of teaching at Loyal Heights.

The bar was set high and it should be high.

This year has had some obvious challenges due to the temporary move into John Marshall school.

There are obviously going to be kinks to be worked out.

It would be unreasonable to expect things wouldn't skip a beat.

Kinks are one thing, utter disruption is another thing entirely.

The busing situation has been a complete and utter debacle at this point.

From our own firsthand experience from what we've heard from other families the district seems to have thoroughly dropped the ball on being able to deliver our children to school and get them home in a timely manner.

As we stood outside the school protesting yesterday I was distracted by the teachers that were very clearly awaiting a bus that had not arrived and it was a half hour after school had started at that point.

This morning I had to drive my son to school because I was notified at 805 that the bus was running 40 minutes behind schedule.

The bus situation is a huge headache for sure yet it pales in comparison to the looming issue of split classrooms throughout our school.

We want our son and every child at Loyal Heights to experience a version of what Jack had last year in Ms. Caldwell's class.

That is a teacher that took time with each and every student, had a clearly organized teaching plan and always seemed to be calm, cool and collected amidst the youthful chaos of a kindergarten class.

How can we expect that from teachers who are learning on the fly to teach multiple grades at once and certainly not being compensated for adhering to two sets of curriculum standards.

I am not a teacher yet I know full well that I don't do my best work while stressed.

The children of Little Heights are far too important to be thrust into this poorly assembled, disheveled and reactionary educational plan.

Our teachers are too valuable and deserve better.

We can all have a little patience with the busing situation however there is no patience to be had when our child's education is at stake.

Please conclude your comments.

Give us our new kindergarten teacher today.

Thank you.

Emily Kunsen, Kimberly McCormick, Janine Dodge, yeah come on up.

Hello my name is Kim McCormick.

I'm asking you to please approve the architectural services contract for the Ingram addition.

North end high school capacity is desperately needed.

Like Lincoln high school the Ingram addition is not due to come online until the 2019-20 school year.

Please make planning for high school capacity a board and district priority.

Proposed amendments to the 2017-18 school boundaries were recently presented to the Ops Committee along with the recommendation to limit full grandfathering to just two elementary schools.

Please keep the board goal of cultural responsiveness in mind when you review these recommendations as if approved these actions will impact hundreds of children including many who qualify for free and reduced lunch, ELL and special education services.

For example Olympic Hills a Title I school added a fourth kindergarten this year and as such they are perfectly positioned to grow into their new building.

Just like Arbor Heights, Thornton Creek and other schools are being given the opportunity to do.

Why then is Olympic Hills being split which in turn triggers an avalanche of geo splits at half a dozen or more schools including at least three other Title I schools.

Disrupting the educational continuity of elementary school students may necessitate costly interventions in middle school and beyond.

Likewise the creation of a high poverty assignment school at Cedar Park and the resulting segregation of our north end schools could have profound impacts when these kids hit middle school.

The strategic plan states that our children come first.

Please request the re-evaluation of all 2017-18 boundary changes with the goal of implementing the least disruptive most equitable and most accommodating plan possible.

Please make this a priority issue for the capacity management task force.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Holly Hokut.

Ellen Kildall.

Andrea Bernarding.

Hi I'm Andrea Bernarding and I'm yielding my spot to Eden Mack.

Hello.

I apologize I actually didn't prep my testimony tonight.

I'm Eden Mack.

I didn't prep testimony because I was so far down on the list I didn't think it would happen.

But what I wanted to talk about today just very briefly was to thank you and the district very much for setting up the capacity management task force.

I am really grateful for this public engagement opportunity that exists to review our capacity issues and I just want to thank you very much for that work.

And I'll echo what Kim said I think there's some really critical stuff that needs to be reviewed by that task force around the boundary changes and so forth so I hope that does become a priority.

I understand that the proposal has substantial kids of color and diversity and FRL being the ones that are picked up and moved in the north end and I think that's concerning.

And I think that we should take a moment to review the data since it was five years ago that the plan was made.

So I appreciate your service to our kids and since I didn't prep I'm actually going to have extra time so thank you.

Good evening I am Ellen Kildall and I have a fifth grade daughter at Loyal Heights Elementary.

I also did not prepare extraordinary remarks like the people who spoke before me because I was down on the list.

What I would like to say is that this spring I sat through several meetings at Loyal Heights Elementary where they discussed the plans for the mega school.

I heard lots of parents and community members rail against the plans because it is too big, the school is too big on a small lot.

I know the teachers supported that because they need a new building.

However, what we heard on the playground in discussions before and after school was that people didn't feel heard by the school board.

They felt like their decisions and their opinions didn't matter.

You have an extraordinary opportunity here to rebuild trust at Loyal Heights Elementary by fixing the problem with kindergarten today.

We need a new kindergarten teacher.

There are 88 students, if the state mandate is 22 that means we need four.

So you have the opportunity to fix that trust that feels broken at Loyal Heights Elementary.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Stacey Whiting.

Christine Smith.

Danny Porbus.

Allison McCabe.

JoLynn Mason.

I have a feeling that a lot of my compatriots tonight are stuck in traffic as we were.

It took us much longer to get down here than we anticipated.

Like many people on the agenda tonight I am here to speak on behalf of Loyal Heights Elementary.

This move is one we went into with trepidation but we trusted that the district would act in the best interest of our students and our families.

And it is really heartbreaking to feel like that's not the case.

We need another kindergarten teacher.

Disrupting three classrooms is bad enough but disrupting all the classrooms is even worse.

We have ongoing bus situation issues.

The playground is not safe.

It seems like the least the district could do if they are truly concerned about educating our students and that they care for every child in every class every day.

is to think about the ramifications of what would happen if halfway into the first month of school you created splits throughout the school.

We would lose education time.

Our teachers would lose connections with their students.

People wouldn't, kids wouldn't see their friends.

Second graders might not be able to eat lunch with their friends or third graders.

It's a lot to ask our families.

We know that there are mitigation funds.

It seems like this is a mitigation circumstance.

We are concerned that our safety system has not been moved from our previous building into the new building.

And I hope that moving forward we can find a way to work together and solve this problem rather than continuing to feel like we're in an adversarial process.

I hope that we are all here because we care about the children that are being educated in Seattle Public Schools.

That's why I'm here.

That's why so many parents are here today and we hope that that's why you're here because you want to act in the best interests of our children.

Thank you.

Thank you.

That is the end of our testimony but I would like to say thank you to everyone who is here tonight and also for those parents who gave such passionate testimony and we are here and we definitely hear what you are saying tonight.

Thank you so much.

We are now going into board comments.

Director Pinkham.

I had to go first because Loyal Heights you are in my district.

First off but I just want to roll back I will get to Loyal Heights here.

I just want to congratulate the CTE skills center award winners Deborah Halpern as well to get a White House award and a fantastic Thank you to our now departed student Kennedy from Franklin high school to also highlight issues that are going on that yes they are doing the new bus times and stuff and trying to make it cost neutral boom other costs are coming up and the impact we are starting to see that domino type of effect and thanks for highlighting some of those issues.

And I'm remembering being at the mayor's education summit when they had students up at the podium and I wish I could remember the student's name but he's someone that maybe we need to reach out to that we need to grow our own and have them help you know the vision that we have here because he's the one that said it's not about me, it's not about you, it's about the students.

If we can keep that in mind.

And other input that I've heard about you know it's our legal obligation to provide seats for our students but there's no legal obligation to provide the education it's more of a moral obligation.

And I think this is kind of where we're stepping on an issue and I have to find out you know Yes, Loyal Heights is here saying this is what we need, this is what we are going through.

We have 88 students, actually this Saturday at my community meeting I think it was 81 so they have grown in a sense by seven since Saturday and now they have 88 students so they are growing.

Is this the only school that has that problem with their kindergarten level students?

Is there other schools that also yes we are at 80 students and we only have three teachers because I know Lowell Heights are very proud that your PTA is very strong but there are other schools out there that I also want to listen to and see what is going on and yes address those issues.

We are at that 22 per student and for the Title I schools it is even smaller we need to provide that.

Somehow yes that system that we have there is something broken.

Something is not working.

And you know the definition of insanity that we keep on going back to that same system and oh we will make it work so something has to change.

You know so the policy has to change.

Do we look at the capacity of the building or do we look at what is the actual classroom or grade level?

Yeah, 88 students, three classrooms, we need another teacher at Loyal Heights.

Kindergarten teacher.

Another issue that was brought up by Loyal Heights parents is the actual physical space at Loyal Heights.

That as we look at a classroom of 31 students those classrooms are small.

They mentioned yeah 31 students we can't even really have little breakout sessions that maybe they are used to having because there is no room.

And then if we want to double those classrooms by having split classes again how is that teacher going to handle that?

The space, the physical space itself in the classrooms are small.

So I think splitting classrooms for this situation isn't ideal either because the physical space isn't there.

Another teacher is needed.

So Loyal Heights I am still with you.

Loyal Heights wasn't the only issue here.

I do also have a request that we can as we are looking at the new boundary issues as well.

Yes that was based on 2012 data set and I would like to see again what is the current data set right now that we are looking at now as far as the boundaries that are being drawn and proposed.

So as we look at this help us make smart decisions.

You know that we have the most recent information that we can.

And as we look at enrollment by school when they say these sections that are on these maps, I'm requesting to have more, they're broken down by grade level.

Not just say there's 180 students in this one particular section.

I would need to know what's the K level, what's the first grade level, etc.

What's the FRL, free reduced lunch, ELL, gender, race, other things that special ed students also sometimes seem to get lost in this when we're talking about these issues.

And another thing that I guess I learned new the Title I status that that's sometimes a moving target.

That's set later as far as once we find how things settle down.

Is that true or not?

Maybe define that as a question.

So again just if we can get the updated status for what is the current 2006 enrollment numbers.

So we can get those as we are asked to make these boundary changes.

Questions about grandfathering you know why not grandfather for the benefit of the students?

not for our budget.

Yes that is a concern but what is the benefit for our students?

You know I have first-hand knowledge of the impacts as your, excuse me, children are moved from school to school in the middle of K-3 or K-5 if they go to a new environment.

Yes the principals, teachers they want to welcome all students and make that transition as easy as possible but there is still that impact.

on that child as far as transitioning.

So someone has to take those seats.

Let's do our best to keep the students in the same school and transition to new boundaries and steps.

My goodness excuse me.

And I also have questions about the waitlist.

Looking online it says the waitlist is dissolved.

Just kind of clarification what do you mean by dissolved?

What do the numbers represent that are on there?

Are those still students on the waitlist?

Are those numbers now after people have been removed and they got assigned to a class that was on the waitlist.

So I need to get some clarification on that.

And so I would like to see that the demand and supply as I look at Loyal Heights they still have students on the waitlist for theirs even.

And if they were saying oh you missed it by two students but there's like 10 students on the waitlist.

You know are we holding back for budget reasons and so I know this is a tough work and I appreciate the work that our district staff does.

I know it's tough.

I know it's hard but I think we can work together.

I value the parents input.

You know the knowledge that's out there.

It's amazing.

So you know what Kim McCormick has shared, other people, Kelly LaRue, these other people out there.

They seem sometimes, they have that institutional knowledge that we are missing here.

We need to work together.

I need to see this board, the superintendent, the district not become a them, we are an us.

That we all work together for the benefit of our students.

Hopefully I don't have two minutes here.

North end boundaries and school assignments, Cedar Park looking at no matter how we draw the boundaries right now if that stays in an area assigned school or assignment school it's going to be high free and reduced lunch, high minority population.

Is that school, yes the principal may say I'm ready for that, let me handle that.

But is the facilities ready for it as well?

Those are questions we need to ask.

So what maybe can we do with Cedar Park?

Yes there are seats there.

Does it have to be an area assigned school?

Can it be an option school to help draw better populations to that are more diverse?

Because again just the way the things that are laid out up in that area no matter how we draw the boundaries.

It's going to be high FRL, high ELL as well.

So just asking what other options can we consider there.

I think about what I've heard these last few days, you know again why are we here?

For the students.

I want to go back, thank you to John Muir Elementary and the Black Lives Matter and we stand together despite the emails that we got in our inboxes and find out that wasn't our Seattle community that was from people on the outside and they stood strong and still the community showed up to show their support.

I also want to thank, give a shout out to Nathan Hale High School and co-principals Jill Hudson and Jillian Grimes.

They welcomed the Urban Native Education Alliance to the school and we held a ceremony there to raise tribal nation flags at their school.

Thank you and those that turned out, actually I think you are all here to my committee meeting on Saturday.

I definitely was thinking I'm going to go there and talk about boundaries and other challenges but it was the Loyal Heights issue and again I hear you and we need to, yes they are saying we have processes to follow and I'm asking for, yes we follow the processes but that problem is still there.

What can we do now?

Other issues that they brought up I want to make sure that don't get lost in the fourth teacher that they are needing.

Loyal Heights are talking about the security systems there, the bell system, the safety of the children as well.

And I mentioned, kind of alluded to before, just the physical space for the classes.

Can they handle to even be at 22-25 students, is that pushing the limit of the physical space?

Mentioned the grandfathering, what can we do to return the students to the current schools?

The oversight of the spectrum program was something that was brought up at the schools that you know some schools may advertise themselves as advanced learning spectrum but when they actually get there oops I guess we don't have that oversight of those to make sure what's out there as parents choose their schools that what they are seeing advertised is being delivered.

Boundary changes impacts on our special ed students.

You know one person asked yes if out of the area now for the school that I'm assigned when the boundaries changes will I still be able to keep my current school as a special ed student.

Special ed transportation also being an issue and concern.

the late buses you mentioned here today and the drivers I found out when the school district sent out an announcement on our website saying yes please be patient with us with these delays because you know drivers are checking students in and checking them off making sure they have the right students and the parents are saying no that's not happening.

The drivers aren't checking that list off you know they are probably in a rush we have to get through so we need to talk to the transportation those drivers out there making sure that they are doing what we are they are doing that we said this is what you need to do.

An issue was brought up that a child got on a bus that didn't have an operating radio and that child got on the wrong bus and they couldn't contact that bus.

So I need to find out what systems in there because this apparently was a substitute bus driver there is nothing in there to check okay let's get them on the bus does the radio work?

No it doesn't work.

What's the backup?

Does the driver have a cell phone?

Because again our kids we need to make sure we are watching out for them.

And it's new boundaries definitely want some more information on that.

My next community meeting hopefully will be as lively as the last one.

It will be Saturday October 15th 1 to 230 again at Broadview library and my November meeting will be November 19th I believe it is which is a Saturday and that will be at 345 to 515 at the Northgate branch.

And again Loyal Heights and all the people here Qeˀciyéẁyéẁ.

Thank you.

Director Burke.

Tough act to follow there.

I want to also thank everyone for their testimony.

When you come here and tell us your stories it's much more powerful than when we read it in email.

When we read it in email it's powerful but when you come here and actually share it with us it really drives it home.

So thank you for that.

I want to thank my neighbor Ms. Harrison who joined us from Franklin high school and it's great to hear some of the positive things that she shared about decisions the board has made and the impact of that on the school and the students.

I'm thrilled to acknowledge the mathematical expertise that's being grown out of that school.

I think that's a tribute to The feeder schools, the educators, the commitment of the families, and I also really appreciate how she shared a list of sort of the shining features and the equity work that's taking place at that school.

I also want to commend our leaders and practitioners for their CTE awards, career and technical education.

This is a favorite topic of mine, I see it as a convergence of student interests, relevant post K-12 topics, it's positive in the political landscape.

It nurtures industry partnerships, it has the support of the philanthropic community so the more we can look towards CTE opportunities and examples of success and replicate them in our buildings and in our classrooms I think that's an amazing thing.

Regarding the leadership at John Muir.

I think that when we look at our public image sometimes we are judged on the symbolism but what I look to is how we are judged on our actions and what is actually taking place in our schools and in our classrooms.

And I'm super proud of the work that the staff is doing centrally and in our buildings around race and equity around African-American male initiative and so I commend the staff at John Mayer for their work.

Regarding the boundary shift, boundary shifts are always a contentious topic.

They are always a challenge.

It is something that we end up talking about, debating about, trying to find what is the least worst.

And again the feedback from the affected community helps drive that discussion.

So I want to make sure people recognize that there are upcoming meetings.

a series of five meetings.

The first one is tomorrow and it's really important that people attend that if they have feedback, concerns, unintended consequences, go to these meetings and get your concerns on the record because that's what helps us as a board understand the impact of these decisions.

I want to make a comment about Ms. Burke who raised a testimony about bell times.

Full disclosure no relation just want to get that out there.

And I would like to personally take the extra 20 minutes of instructional time that's under discussion as an opportunity to try to steer us towards a two-tier transportation system.

I think it's a great opportunity and I'd like to see that leveraged.

Loyal Heights guests.

So we have read and heard about a lot of the impact in your school, enrollment, move to an interim site, transportation, new building systems and infrastructure that is not quite fully baked.

And I want to, I have to say that I am sorry because Organizationally as a policy body we try to set clear guidelines, we try to figure out effective formulas, we try to do things that are going to be in the best interest of the most kids and your building took a hit.

And especially hearing the story firsthand it's a little bit heartbreaking.

So I want to go back to some conversations that we've had as a board where we've We said we recognize that formulas can't identify all of our problems and so the previous board set aside money for mitigation funds and this board set aside more money for mitigation funds.

to help offset problems like this because there is no formula or policy that can handle every exception case, every challenge, every situation that a building faces.

But what we can do is we can put our money where our mouths are and we can try to speak to the core values by which we want that applied.

And for me personally that means minimizing disruptions for our students and teachers.

That means minimizing forced splits.

That means respecting our existing staff placements in our schools.

And what I've heard from the Loyal Heights community and what I've heard from the board and my understanding of how those mitigation funds will be spent, my true hope and expectation is that you will not be in a situation with forced splits.

Again true hope and expectation.

So thanks again for sharing those concerns and they do not fall on deaf ears.

I have an upcoming community meeting Saturday October 1st 3.30pm at Greenwood Public Library.

And I want to also announce something that we're still trying to work out the invitations will be posted on the website shortly but I want to also invite any of my colleagues to a Lincoln high school community meeting Thursday October 27 630 to 830 p.m.

at the Lincoln library.

Director Peters.

Well you both are hard acts to follow actually.

Well first of all I want to thank the student speakers we had with us tonight and that was Kennedy and also Gracie.

Both of them were from Franklin high school.

You know Franklin is one of our gems of a school.

It's got a lot to offer and I keep hearing such wonderful things about it.

It's also a wonderfully diverse school and both the students brought to us both the strengths and also some of the challenges and the needs of the school and I hope we will be able to address them.

Let's see I will be having my next community meeting on Saturday October 8 from 11 to 1 o'clock at the Queen Anne library.

At my most recent community meetings these were the sorts of topics that my constituents brought forth.

Capacity is a big issue.

The use of special ed instructional assistants is another issue.

Supporting our veteran teachers.

A proposal in support of doing two tiers for buses next year.

Let's see the status of middle college and then questions about how the district takes care of our buildings when they are vacant.

So this is the variety of topics that came up in a very thoughtful meeting that we had I think it was just last week.

To the Loyal Heights families thank you so much for coming out here.

I have been in your position before in fact that's what I was doing before I got on the board.

I was a parent who was concerned about something that's going on in the district and I think what parents want is something quite basic.

We want stability for our students.

We want predictability.

And your community has gone through a lot of change in the last year and like Director Burke I offer you my apologies for all you've had to go through.

My own children were in an interim site for a while so I know the adjustments that go with that.

We are lucky as a district that we have an interim site.

So that's that's the good thing and some of these interim sites yes they're a little bit dusty you know they haven't been used as a full-blown school for a while so you do have to make some adjustments.

But I think in terms of what you're facing the most important one has to do with the staffing and having large kindergarten classes and what the impact would be if you don't have another teacher.

And I think tonight you brought forth a very strong case for being under lots of mitigating circumstances.

And so as has been mentioned before we do have mitigation funds to address these sorts of issues and so I am eager to find out what is decided or determined on the 23rd which I believe is this Friday regarding your enrollment count and what can be done to decrease the instability that your community has already gone through.

And I also want to give a special shout out to the students from your community who spoke tonight.

I think the little girl in the front row you did a great job.

So thank you all for coming out tonight.

Regarding I just want to say something about some of the mail that we received in the last couple of weeks regarding John Muir elementary and also Garfield high school.

I want to point out that the vast majority of the mail was not from our community it was from around the country and this is something that happens a topic hits the national conscience and then we get responses from all over the country from people who aren't stakeholders in our town and some of the language is very ignorant of the circumstances of our city and it's not representative of our town and I don't want to give that sort of language the benefit of time and repetition.

And I think we as a district and as a city just need to hold forth and embrace the diversity of our district and our city, understand the challenges we have, we have a demographic that is changing here and that manifests itself in many ways within our district.

And we are trying our best to support all of our students with all their different needs.

Speaking of which.

I would like to thank Laura Gramer for bringing to my attention that this is Deaf Awareness Month and this is actually International Deaf Awareness Week.

So there's going to be an event this Saturday that I encourage people to attend and it is the Deaf Thrive Day which will be Saturday, September 24th at South Lake Union Park from 10 to 2. And here's a little description about it.

It's a family-friendly festival that brings the deaf community together to celebrate being deaf and to show Seattle that we are happy, healthy, and thriving.

The event will have speeches from leaders and ASL performances on stage.

Volunteers from deaf organizations will coordinate kids play activities in between speeches and performances.

There will be booths to share information and mobile greeters will walk around and share fun sign language words to the non-signing attendees.

Come join us and see what we have to offer as we continue to thrive here in Seattle.

So thank you Laura for bringing that to our attention.

Growth boundaries, capacity, these are going to be the big topics of the fall and into the spring.

We are a growing city, we are a growing district and so we are having to make adjustments and so I am just going to sort of offer a heads up to all of us and to staff that we are going to have to have some really deep discussions about what to do.

I'm hearing from the community lots of concerns about us not being ready for the high school needs we have.

We already have some really large numbers in our existing high schools, a lot of our existing high schools.

And there is concern in the community about what our vision, what our path forward is going to be.

So whatever we can do to come forth with some good solutions and to reassure the community that we are aware that we have some challenges would be greatly helpful.

As far as the growth boundaries you know I am also concerned about grandfathering and not doing enough grandfathering.

I understand there are reasons for why there may be limits to what we can do but I also have experienced communities that have had their students uprooted from schools and not being able to matriculate from their schools whether it is an elementary school or a middle school and how painful that is for a student to be broken away from his or her community and friends and I would like to urge us as a district to not do that.

Wherever we can let's allow our students to finish their classes, finish their years in the school they are in so that they are not destabilized.

But this is going to be an ongoing conversation I realize.

Regarding bell times I'm interested to know how things are working out.

I would also be interested to know whether we have any statistics about first period attendance in high school.

from the past and then look at it for this year and next year and see if there's any difference.

That's just one metric we can look at.

There's lots of others.

But I'd be very interested to know because Seattle is a national leader on this change and I'm very excited to see how it works out.

Dr. Nyland mentioned one of the topics we brought up at the board retreat recently was allocating some funds to look into replacing our math materials for our middle school level math.

We already have some schools that are doing really good work with some materials.

I think we can start there and see what they are doing and replicate what works.

So I think that's, oh I want to finish with one last thought and that is September is also the month when the city is collecting poetry from all citizens who are interested in submitting for the poetry on the buses.

The theme this year is water and the requirements are no more than 50 words.

The deadline is September 30. One poem per citizen and you submit this to the poetryonthebuses.org website and it does not have to be in English they are accepting multiple different languages and if you are lucky enough to be chosen your poem will be published on the bus, buses so I encourage people to submit their poems.

Alright thank you.

Dr. Geary.

Thank you everybody for coming.

It is really good to see a community come together and present to us.

I think that's important.

I think you set an example for everybody in our city.

I'd like to see many of our communities come together as units and come before us.

I think it's a really great thing.

We will do what we can to respond.

I'm not, I don't see that as a bad thing ever.

And I see you setting an example of what other schools can do to come together as a group.

And I think that's great.

There's clearly watching you you know each other you've bonded together you support your principal and I and I appreciate so much your efforts.

And I'll get more to the details a little bit later.

I want to.

I want to thank Kennedy Harrison and Gracie Brown for coming on behalf of Franklin and it is so gratifying to have them come in and point out some of the good things appreciating the work that has been done at their school and letting us know that that does impact how they feel about school.

I think it is important when we make those improvements that it does affect a child's how they feel about coming to school and that we need to make sure that we are looking at all of our schools because we do have some schools that even a fresh coat of paint would probably go a long way so we need to keep working on that.

I heard very well Kennedy saying that their band had to take the bus and walk from Westlake to the Seattle center and frankly that really strikes me as very sad.

I teared up.

It's charming, it shows their resiliency as students that they can come and be so positive and say nice things and have to go to that effort to do just the basics.

The basics that I see other high schools we do provide for them.

So I heard you Kennedy and I hope we can do something for you because those are the kids that are working so hard to succeed, so hard to have a normal, what they have been told is a normal school, a good academic, a good enriched experience within our school district.

And we must do everything in our power to support them in that effort.

I'm just, you know, it's been very emotional because we have received so many ugly emails from so many people.

And it just breaks my heart because I think of the families who go out and have to confront that attitude.

They don't know if the person that they're talking to holds that in their heart and I think about that because that's scary and the things we see on TV are so scary in terms of I would hate to be pulled over by the police and think what that could result in.

So I'm sorry I'm emotional but it's been very emotional for me.

I want to thank the students at Garfield for being brave and taking a knee because I know what they're fighting for is not to disregard the efforts of the people who have fought for this country but they are trying to fight in some ways in a very peaceful manner.

They're taking a knee and taking a stand to make this country something that they can believe in.

something that they will graduate from high school and want to defend, be proud of.

And so I am very proud of them for that.

Just as I am very proud of our John Muir community for even after threats, even after we in all of our due diligence said that we could not go forward with the event, that they went forward with that event.

I'm glad that they could read between the lines and see that that was something that they needed to do and it wasn't for us at the district level and it wasn't to appease the nation or even the city.

It was for those children in that building and they knew that and so they showed up for those children and our staff showed up at 530 in the morning and did everything they could to make sure that whatever threats were out there were eliminated so that could happen.

So thank you our staff.

Thank you John Muir.

Thank you community for coming out on behalf of those kids and protecting those kids shielding them for that moment from the ugliness that we as adults had to face in making that happen.

So thank you to our city for that.

As for the boundary issues I think this is all the student enrollment plan, the boundary issues, what we are seeing at Loyal Heights.

We know that this happened last October.

I know we as a board and as a school district tried to come up with methods to reduce what happened last October.

And you school fell through the cracks again on top of all the other shifting.

And it is a lot for a community to bear.

And I feel that and so much stress especially for kindergarten parents who are coming in.

They want their kids to love school.

They don't want them to be anxious.

It's the beginning of a career that we want to be great.

So we hear you.

I am very thankful that we as a district as a board have set aside mitigation funds in anticipation that this is a problem we faced last year.

So we are trying.

We did make changes, we need to do better, and we will continue to strive to do better.

need to look at our student enrollment plan, need to understand where we can build in flexibility.

Sometimes we cling to the bright line rule because it seems fair, but then so much inequity rolls out of it.

So we need to build in some flexibility for our families on our boundaries, grandfathering, And I'm very thankful that one of the things we have done is put together the capacity task force and I thank Eden for coming and I thank her for putting her time in that.

That was something when I was running for the board that I asked and I asked immediately afterwards that be put into place.

I wish it had been put into place a little bit earlier but we have that now and we're also confronting boundary changes that were conceived before all of these changes hit our city or as they were hitting as we hadn't planned for them.

So if we can take the time now to use the capacity task force that we have created to help us with these decisions, to help us mitigate these effects, then we need to do that.

Because otherwise we put up a task force, we're confronted with this huge change, and we're not going to allow it to give us the benefit of its formation.

So I would like to see that we use this great thing that we have created.

So kudos to us, but only if we use it.

Tonight we are going to be looking at the principal contract and one of the things that I want to highlight is that we are giving greater weight now to school climate and culture.

And so hopefully As we emphasize that, I was very concerned about the comment about rewarding test scores.

Because we need to reward our principals for creating great school climate and culture.

That's where I want to see the reward.

So let's look for that.

Director Burke and I today had a chance to meet with Jill Hudson and Julie Grimes at Ingram as well on different issues but it was really exciting because what she brought up oh Nathan Hill excuse me Nathan Hill and let me I jumped because really what we were talking about is the possibility for Lincoln and we are going to be creating a new high school and it is a chance for us to use vision and create a school that as Director Burke pointed out is going to make our students Seattle ready.

And that's what we really want.

And so I think it's a really exciting time and I invite us all to put our thought into what we want for this high school that we're creating from the ground up.

Something that's visionary, something that we can all be proud of in terms of doing things differently.

We're a different city.

We have John Muir and the people there.

We do have a very strong social justice piece.

We have a very strong environmental piece.

We have a very strong technology piece.

And we have an appreciation of arts and culture.

And so I want to see a high school that rewards and develops around all those and is exciting for kids to go to and can be a model for our whole nation just as I think our kids are prepared to be leaders in our nation.

All right I'm going to stop there there's other things there's so much going on now everybody said great thoughts and had great things to say and I agree with many of them.

My meeting changed it was on Saturday but I'm going to be going to Spokane for a directors meeting so I've moved it to Sunday 2 to 3.30 at Northeast branch library.

My last meeting one person showed up so if you want to have the ear of a director you can come to my meeting.

I will be there.

You know I don't know if that's because I'm doing a really good job and nobody comes or you know what that means but maybe it was just early in the school year.

And my final thing is that we had great presentation on team read at our last board meeting.

The applications for team read for the high schoolers who want to participate in team read is due on September 26. So if you have high schoolers who want to be reading mentors tutors for second and third graders please get them out there it just sounded like a great opportunity and if there are concerns about transportation it is my understanding that we will help students with that piece.

Thanks everybody.

Director Blanford.

I'll start off by thanking both Gracie and Kennedy for their presentations today.

They spoke very eloquently on the role of social justice at Franklin high school and I appreciated that especially.

I want to thank all of those who participated or won awards for CTE.

and particularly Deborah Halperin for the President's Award.

It sounds like we are sending a lot of people to Washington DC and to the White House which is a wonderful thing.

I to the Lowell Heights community and particularly those of you that testified as I was listening I was thinking about when I was a kindergarten parent for the first time and those first few weeks of school and so excited about sending my daughter off to school and expectations about her journey through Seattle Public Schools.

And so I join my colleagues in apologizing for this experience so far and my hope based on what we have heard in the presentations is that there is some mitigation funding that is available that has been set aside.

and based on what we've heard it seems to be a compelling case for that mitigation.

I've been around the block a few times now, this is my third year on the board.

Coming up and finishing my third, about to start in my fourth year soon.

And it's fall and it's As perennial as the leaves falling down from the trees that we are in this situation.

It is usually one or two schools that when they see the number of students that walk in the door and the number of teachers that are there to greet them They have concerns and they share those concerns with us and sometimes we figure out a way to mitigate and to assure that everyone starts off the year as well as can be.

But we don't, we work on the symptom we don't work on the actual problem.

In the past I have said that I wish that there were a way to bottle up all the energy that the parents are showing on their particular school advocating for their particular school, bottling that up and redirecting it towards where the problem actually is.

We were able to put forth $2 million towards mitigation but that's not going to be enough for all of the schools that are challenged and ultimately this becomes an issue around funding.

It becomes the fact that we are, the superintendent is fond of quoting the actual number of where we are ranked compared to the other states in the nation.

and the fact that you know we have a highly educated citizenry in Seattle but we only have a certain number of dollars that we can allocate towards education is a severe issue and I am always hypersensitive to the opportunity cost of making a decision that benefits one school but is at the detriment of another.

When we are elected as school board directors we are elected to serve 54,000 students.

All 54,000 students that call Seattle Public Schools their school.

And that requires that we make really tough decisions and that frequently there are people that do not get the answer that they want.

we have to figure out what processes are in place and try to make sure that those processes are as fair as possible so that we are not penalizing one school in order to benefit another school.

I don't believe that that will be the case in this situation because those mitigation funds have been set aside.

Again, I encourage all of the people who came to testify, all the people that are listening in, that this is an issue that if you are thinking about only your school and your and you're not thinking about all 54,000 students in Seattle Public Schools or all million plus students in Washington State then that is immoral I think.

It is moral to advocate for all students and I hope that you'll join me and lots of other people who are regularly down in the legislature testifying that we get some resolution of the McCleary decision so that we don't as a board have to make these from Peter to pay Paul decisions going forward.

I have a community meeting, I had a robust community meeting this past Saturday and I have another one scheduled for October 15. This one will be at Douglas Truth library and it will start at 10 o'clock.

And I would like to end my comments by saying this past week, these past 10 days have been particularly difficult.

as the school board director.

We were in a daylong retreat last Saturday that was difficult for lots of different reasons and then as has been shared before we received a deluge of emails that came in from people around the country.

First on the John Muir decision and then on the Garfield decision.

The John Muir decision was as the school board director one of my more difficult moments to be in the room as the information was being communicated to the principal that we weren't in support of moving forward because of the security threat.

We had been getting emails all week saying that we should make that decision and we wanted to stand firm but when it came to taking a risk with other people's children that was a risk that no one was willing to take.

It was very heartening on Friday to show up and see the response of the community and students and the teachers and particularly the principal, Principal Paul Cuthbertson who I saw an excellent expression of leadership throughout all of this and caring for her staff and her school community.

And then on Saturday we got a new set of emails that were coming in as a result of our students at Garfield deciding to, the football team deciding to take a knee and being joined by their teachers or their coaches.

And wherever you fall on that issue I know it's a contentious issue for lots of people.

The types of emails that we got and the language that we got in those emails was as an African-American man was so deeply offensive that I was stunned as I was reading them.

and after a while I couldn't look at them anymore just because I didn't want to, I didn't want to live in a country that had people that felt that strongly, that negatively and would choose to call our students the names that they called them and call their teachers the names that they called them and call us as board directors the names that they use.

The N word was frequently cited.

They referred to our students as apes and worse than that.

And you know in my mind regardless of where you fall on that issue, we have to applaud the fact that our students are learning about the issues that their community, are faced in their community and deciding to take action.

Action that is not violent, action that is well thought through.

And so I'll just share very quickly knowing that time is going quickly.

One person in particular for some reason I decided to click on an email and it was a Marine, a person that announced very early on to say that he is serving currently in active duty in the Marines and was totally offended by the idea that our students would kneel during the national anthem and went on to say a lot of the things that we heard throughout or read throughout the emails that we received from lots of different folks.

And because he was in the military and because my father was in the military and my brother was in the military and my uncle won an award for jumping on a grenade and saving his fellow troops in Vietnam I felt compelled to respond to that particular email.

And I didn't respond in the way that I wanted to which was just to firebomb him in the same way that he was responding.

But to actually try to engage in dialogue and sent the email and was pleasantly surprised that I received an email back the next day from him.

And the tone and tenor of his email to me the second time went way down and actually started to engage in conversation.

He wanted to understand why I had the opinion that I had.

I sought to understand more about why he felt the way that he did.

And we emailed every day so the first email was on Saturday and we have emailed every day since then seeking to deepen our understanding of the complexity of this issue.

And yesterday he ended his email by saying Director Blanford what should we do about this?

And when I read it I thought he was saying what should we as a community or what should we as a nation do about this issue?

And then he clarified and he said no what do you and me, how can we work together to solve this problem?

And I didn't have an easy answer for that but I thought that that was an example of that we need to as adults demonstrate because our children are watching us and when we are so polarized and so adversarial and can understand no other opinion than those that we have and our friends have then we can't exist in America very well because we are built on making compromise and finding a tough answer to a difficult challenge.

And so it was in a week of disillusionment it was a very heartwarming exchange of ideas between me and this person and I just I thought it was important to share that with the community at large.

And so I look forward to not getting any more of the negative emails but hopefully changing the conversation and the narrative to something that is a little bit more positive.

So thank you.

I would like to congratulate, congratulations to the outstanding staff who were recognized tonight for their dedication in their fields of expertise and in offering them to our students.

I also would like to thank you to all the parents from Laurel Heights and Principal Floyd for your passionate testimony about your school and what is it that expectation that you have for your students.

and really you know pretty heartfelt and as most of my colleagues have already mentioned we did put money aside for medication, can't even pronounce it, mitigation.

here and that is because of every student that makes Seattle Public Schools as it is.

We are up here because we care about kids and a lot of you know that most of the decisions that we make is based on because of our students.

Yes sometimes we make mistakes but overall we are here because we are very passionate about the kids that we serve.

Because if that was the case I really would rather be flying somewhere else than be up here.

serve here, 54,000 kids were here tonight listening to your passionate testimony and we hear you loud and clear.

A great thank you to Kanari and Gracie for sharing with us all the positive things that are happening at Franklin.

And I go down there and visit quite often and I hear a lot of positive things that go on but to hear it from students it's a whole different story and just to hear them talk about all the great things that are happening and also the need that is there and I know that there is so much need in terms of providing funds to help our students in their activities.

And when I hear about the band taking a bus to the stadium and have to walk all the way across.

Now that really bothered me that you know that we as a district could not provide a bus for Franklin's band to be able to so they can go across town and that is not a good thing and certainly we will look into that to make sure that they will never catch another bus again walking or to their activity.

I also would like to congratulate Rainier Beach High School for one of the, to be named one of the opportunities in the National Education Policy Center.

Congratulations Rainier Beach, continue on the good work.

And thank you for all the work that all the teachers and all the principals are doing within all our schools.

We know that without you the work cannot continue on in our schools.

So thank you so much for all the work and I know we don't always tell you what a wonderful job you are doing and tonight we are saying thank you for all the great work that you are doing.

Because we know without you we cannot move forward as a board.

So thank you for all the hard work you do and thank you Superintendent Nyland for all the headaches that you take, for the various things that goes on in the district.

But we appreciate all the hard work that we all put together in order to make this district the best district that we can.

So thank you also to my colleagues for the exciting conversation tonight and hopefully that the message to you is that we care about our students.

Thank you very much.

We are now going to take a 15 minute break.

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