the April 19 regular school board meeting.
I'd like to welcome our student representative from center school Sarita Bradshaw.
Ms. Bradshaw will have an opportunity to provide comments regarding her school later in the meeting.
I think some of our directors are caught in traffic right now and I do expect them to join us shortly but we will go ahead and do the roll call please Ms. Ritchie.
Director Burke.
Here.
Director Pinkham.
Director Patu.
Director Harris.
Here.
Director Peters.
Here.
If everyone would 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 it stands one nation under God with liberty and justice for all.
Peters All right.
We do not have any recognitions this evening.
We do.
All right my script my script is a little outdated apparently.
We're going to do the athletic Hall of Fame during my comments and we've got a video to show with regard to that.
But we did want to recognize the bridges achieve program.
We actually had some of our.
former students that contacted me and asked to make a presentation and it's an exciting bridges partnership between Seattle Public Schools and Highline Community College so it looks like Mikayla.
So Mikayla Clancy director for special education and I'm here to introduce our team that supports Highline achieve at Highline College and our bridges transition services for students who are 18 to 21 has expanded with starting with Highline achieve two years ago.
overall to include college experiences for our students and Madison Williams who is here is a graduate of Bridges and is a current Highline Achieve student and a paid peer navigator for them so she's going to tell her story but I also want to quickly introduce Dr. Sherry Studley who is with us who is the Bridges supervisor program supervisor We have Julie Pollard with us who is the associate director for Highline Achieve for the program.
We have Megan Sanchez who is the IEP case manager for what we call Bridges U. So that's our university partnership with our transition services.
And then Madison who has prepared a presentation for you so we are just going to take a moment to set up.
Hello everyone my name is Madison Williams.
I am a former Seattle Public Schools Bridges transition student and I am currently a student and employee at Highline College.
I want to introduce to you Megan Sanchez.
She is the teacher who now works with students who go to Highline College.
This is my second year at college and I work as a peer navigator.
I am excited to share with you something that is really important to me and to other students.
There is more than just one path for students with disabilities when they finish the 12th grade.
We want more options of opportunities to keep learning and explore new things in our community and world.
Here is my experience.
I knew I really wanted more education beyond high school just like my sister, my cousins and neighborhood friends.
Everybody in my family that wanted to go to college was able to have the opportunity.
I wanted that too.
When things are important to me, my parents always encourage me to go for it, including college.
During my 12th grade year, I looked at a few different programs.
First, we looked at the school district transition programs.
The transition programs are meant to help students with intellectual disabilities move into the adult life and get a job.
Then we looked at the occupational life skills program at Bellevue College, and then we also looked at Highline College's Achieve program.
I knew I wanted a job eventually, but I wanted to get more education too.
I chose the college path.
I chose Achieve.
I spent one year in the school district's transition program.
As much as I enjoyed my friends and teachers at Ingraham High School's transition program, I still felt that something was missing.
I wanted more.
I advocated in my school individual education plan team meeting about wanting to attend Highline College as my transition program.
The district said that I could apply to the Achieve program but that I would have to pay for it because it was not an SPS transition program.
On top of going to Highline College I wanted to be part of the King County School to Work program.
The School to Work program assists students with disabilities to get a job during their transition years before they leave the district.
In order to be part of School to Work I needed to be connected with Seattle Public.
I advocated again to have SPS pay for my transition to take place with the Achieve program.
I was happy that SPS finally said they agreed that going to college was the right path for me and so they agreed to pay for the program at Highline College.
I'm so happy that I advocated with SBS so I could go to Highline College.
It was so worth it.
I learned a lot about myself from being on a college campus.
I have been doing a lot of things that I didn't do before because I did not have access to the many classes, clubs, and campus events that college offers.
I had taken the following classes at Highline, Self Advocacy, Interview Skills, Yoga, Zumba, Public Speaking, Learning Lab and History classes which I love.
Besides being a Highline student for two years, a few things I feel especially proud of are speaking to my legislators during self-advocacy day in Olympia, scoring the winning goal for Highline Unified Soccer, being in the Highline College newspaper three times, getting my paid job, speaking at the Unified Sports fundraiser.
The thing I feel most proud of is this year there are now 12 students from Seattle going to Highline with the support of a chief.
Thank you for listening and for your continued support for all students with intellectual disabilities like me.
I want to introduce to you Sherry Studley.
She is the director of the Bridges Transition Program.
You deserve that.
School board members I won't take up much more of your time but I want to say that I was here three or four years ago to present about our transition services and one of the directors asked me why don't we support students who are at the resource level because they have a hard time in school going to college and keeping jobs and I'm proud to say that next year we will have not 12 Bridges U students but 39. Most of whom come out of the resource setting.
And that's a direct result of your support for the special education department and the special education knowledge and understanding that students who are adult students need this kind of support.
We will additionally be opening up a pilot program at the University of Washington through project search so we are the only district in the country to have two project searches.
We also have one at Children's Hospital and we will have 150 students next year compared to the 90 we had when I took over and the 100 we have this year.
Thank you for your support and thank you for supporting our students.
I also want to acknowledge that Madison's family is with us this evening and appreciate their support and that advocacy to SPS was very direct from Madison for her peers and created a discussion with all of this team that created the support that you are seeing now so thank you very much.
We want to show you how this is expanding and really creating opportunities for students to attend college and change their postsecondary outcomes.
So thank you all very much and thank you Highline achieve for starting that partnership that is now growing.
Thank you all so much.
I'd like to invite Madison and her family and Highline achieve staff to come up and be greeted by the board and take a picture.
th Thank you.
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I'm going to invite all directors and our guest student and Dr. Nyland to come into the audience and we are going to be the guests of Ballard high school chamber orchestra and Ms. Newell and I'd like to welcome them to our board meeting and thank them very much for coming.
Stephen Nielsen.
Thank you.
All right good afternoon.
We are from Ballard High School.
This is the chamber orchestra and we'll be performing the first movement from the Tchaikovsky serenade for strings.
We're honored to be here.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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Ž Ž Ž Yeah.
♪ ♪ Yeah.
¶ ¶ Okay.
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I want to thank you all very much for coming tonight and presenting this beautiful and intricate symphony for us.
I'm going to pass the microphone along to everybody if you could just tell us your first name and what grade you're in and then pass the mic along.
Appreciate it.
I'm Alexandria and I'm a senior.
I'm Ella I'm also a senior.
I'm Cleo I'm a junior.
I'm Anika I'm a freshman.
I'm Annika I'm a sophomore.
I'm Clara and I'm a senior.
I'm Clayton and I'm a freshman.
I'm Claire and I'm a junior.
I'm Ethan and I'm a sophomore.
I'm Isabel I'm a freshman.
I'm Mercy I'm a sophomore.
I'm Michael I'm a freshman.
I'm August and I'm a freshman.
I'm Grace and I'm a junior.
I'm Ellery and I'm a junior.
I'm Veronica and I'm a junior.
I'm Emin and I'm a senior.
I'm Kay and I'm a senior.
I'm Max and I'm a junior.
Thank you Ms. Newell as well.
So one more time for the Ballard high school chamber orchestra.
Thank you very much.