School Board Meeting 8302017 Part 1

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2017 regular meeting of the Seattle school board.

Ms. Shek the roll call please.

Director Blanford, here.

Director Burke, here.

Director Geary, here.

Director Harris, here.

Director Patu, here.

Director Pinkham, present.

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, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

I will now turn the microphone over to Dr. Nyland and welcome Dr. Nyland for our recognitions this evening.

Yes welcome back everyone.

We want to start tonight.

Thank you for our new principals and to the board for coming a little early so that we could do a little bit of a meet and greet.

I'd like to introduce Mike Starosky and he's going to introduce the executive directors who will introduce the principals who came down to say hello tonight.

I appreciate that when they've got long checklists I'm sure of things to do as the last few days wind down here.

Good evening Mike Strosky chief of schools welcome back directors officially.

I would like to just take the opportunity to recognize that through many people's efforts we have the great fortune of having a number of new leaders at Seattle Public Schools this year.

And overall 19 principal changes last spring through efforts of HR, EDSs we were able to do a lot of early hiring.

and our latest hire was in July and so that is great for us.

And so we have some great leaders, not all of them could come tonight but those who are here we are extremely thankful because they are opening brand-new buildings some, some are, all of them are doing professional development so I would like to just recognize for their efforts coming down just for a quick opportunity to meet you and thank you for making the time.

So I would like to introduce the executive directors of schools who will introduce our new principals.

And the first coming to the stage is Executive Director Kim Whitworth.

Good afternoon everybody.

It's so good to be back and it's so good to see you.

Our new principals have already been in their buildings and we've been out visiting and participating in the professional development and to a tee they've hit the ground running.

I'm here to represent Helen Whitworth.

Helen Whitworth Aramaki.

So I'm going to be talking about Helen's principles as well as my own.

Helen's very disappointed that she couldn't be here today so I'm going to help her out with that.

At Cascadia Elementary is Anna Barani.

At Cedar Park Elementary is Doug Woulet.

At Decatur Elementary is Rena Gohagen.

At Emerson Elementary is Erin Rasmussen.

At Gatewood Elementary is Keena Williams.

At Gatzert Elementary is Lori Kazanjian.

At Licton Springs is Lisa Elfin.

At Northgate Elementary is Dede Fauntleroy.

At Olympic Hills Elementary is Libby DeBell.

At View Ridge Elementary is Ed Roos.

At Viewlands Elementary is Amy Kleiner.

And the last one for me at Wedgwood Elementary is Steve Liu.

Sarah Pritchett would like to introduce one of the elementary school principals.

Pritchett I'm filling in for Helen.

I'd like to introduce Ryan Ladaj all the way from Minnesota as a new principal at Blaine K8.

Good afternoon directors and Dr. Nyland.

Sarah Pritchett and I this year now have the honor of working with our middle schools and our high schools as executive directors.

We have very little change in the middle school and high school level which is exciting.

Christina Rogers who can't be here tonight is taking over at Roosevelt.

And then you'll remember from last year in an interim capacity but now in a permanent capacity Dr. Barbara Casey took over at the center school.

Dr. Casey.

She's just a little excited.

And beyond that all of the other transfers and stuff are all internal people who work with Seattle already and we are just excited to get the year rolling.

We've had a lot of really good professional development today including both Dr. D'Angelo and Dr. Freiberg up at Nathan Hale and at Eckstein today with all sorts of feeder schools feeding into them doing some great work on race and equity.

So really good start to the year.

Aramaki.

I'm one of the three executive directors over elementary and K-8.

I'm proud to announce Jerry Guerrero as the new principal at Loyal Heights Elementary.

And then lastly we have Jessica Conte, Dr. Jessica Conte, she is the new principal at Dearborn Park International School.

So principals this is the time you've been waiting for we would like you to come up and we will take a picture with our directors and superintendent.

That's a requirement.

Congratulations.

Thank you.

Okay.

So again thanks to our principals, hope you get off to a great start.

We are pleased with a pipeline that gives opportunities to people within our system, our career mentors, star mentors and career ladder teachers and others who are interested in becoming principals and then we have a pipeline that provides support for them for their first three years in the job.

I forget the exact numbers but a large majority of those that you just met have come up through our system internally and virtually all of the ones hired from outside of the system come to us with a lot of experience.

So we are very fortunate to have really good leadership coming up within the system.

Peters Thank you Dr. Nyland.

So unfortunately we do not have any student presentations this evening.

So now we will return to Superintendent Nyland for his comments.

Nyland All right.

I guess I'll try to be brief.

It kind of must be the start of school.

I've already got six pages worth of good stuff here.

So lots of good work underway.

This is the time of the year when actually some of us, I get a few of those comments about what do you do all summer?

Have you been off all summer?

Where did you go?

And hopefully each of us did get away for at least a little bit of time.

But I mean the list could go on and on and on.

I mean we've got all the people working on grounds, we've got all the custodians cleaning up the buildings, we've got traffic patrol in each of our new schools trying to figure out how to get all of the new equipment in, how to get all of the phones set up, how to get all of the computers set up.

The list just goes on and on and they have to be reasonably coordinated with one another so that they don't trip over each other coming in and out of the building.

So thank you to facilities, operations, all of the people that make good things happen.

And then coming up on my remarks has been an awful lot of getting ready for the exciting part of instruction and so teachers, principals coming to the fore.

A few of the highlights, five new schools are opening, I guess four school buildings and five schools within those buildings.

We made progress this year.

I don't know about other years, last year we opened several new schools but several of those were replacements and so we added a little bit of capacity and we certainly took care of our maintenance backlog but we didn't maybe add as many new seats.

This year we have 2800 new seats, I'm pretty sure we won't grow by that many, so we are making a little bit of progress.

We also added portable seats and we also went in and converted other classroom spaces, computer labs, libraries, things like that.

270 new teachers to the district.

K5 ELA I've lost track I think I heard 1400 people had been trained some of it online some of it in person.

Coming up our tri-day tomorrow our districtwide professional development board members are invited will be here in this room at 830 in the morning but every school will have something very similar.

We've trained 300 facilitators I believe.

to be kind of an interactive online group process activity geared around the board goals that have been adopted by the district.

So that is exciting and we really appreciate SEA, PASS, and our district leadership team to make that happen.

100 new webpages from each of our schools, 20,000 student workstations updated.

So that is just a little of the work that has been done.

And then kind of as a long-time Seattleite and as an old social studies history teacher, can't resist this one, 150 years ago Seattle Public Schools began taking care of their own facilities.

So the beginning of Seattle schools is a little lost in history, Catherine Blaine taught something in her living room but not as a public school.

School boards were elected somewhere in either 1861 or 1862, those records were lost, and they did co-located and co-governance of the schools with the University of Washington until 1867. We've got this little quote that says, in 1867 the school board decided that they were capable of taking over their own schools.

They rented space from the county at 3rd and Yesler and served 23 students.

So for 150 years we have been working really hard to find facilities and serve our students and this is a landmark year as we open more schools and prepare for more kids.

And certainly looking forward to those ribbon cuttings this week.

So as I usually do, I will quickly go through our SMART goals and give you a little bit of an update.

Goal number one, excellence and equity.

And you think it is summer, we are not doing a lot, but 57 of our schools had jumpstart.

Early opportunity for kindergarteners to come to school and get a head start on what the school looks like.

so we don't have quite as many tears on the first day of school.

Summer staircase program, over 2000 of our students participated in summer learning which is a really dynamic research-based program that we would love to tell you more about at some point soon.

350 high school students participated in credit recovery, 225 students had internship opportunities through the skill center and career connected learning.

And, our summer leadership Institute, many of you, almost all of you were there, the board of directors, so I appreciate that, coming and participating with principals as we did the launch for the start of the school year.

I mentioned the K5 ELA instructional materials adoption, those materials are in schools just by the skin of our teeth and teachers are unpacking them and taking the online training and getting ready to roll on that.

A lot of activity underway with regard to high-quality teaching which is that first pillar in our formula for success and again good work with SEA, PASS, and district leadership.

So I won't take time to go through all of that but there's quite a few pieces listed here where we are working with one another on what high-quality instruction looks like and how we do that through orientation.

How we do that through the evaluation process and then how we support teachers if they need additional support.

Goal two is improved systems and our budget continues to be our big challenge in that regard.

So I was together yesterday with colleagues from 10 other Puget Sound area school districts And we all had kind of the same story in terms of we all used ending balances to balance our budget.

So we all did belt tightening and then some were doing better than others going forward but nobody too enthralled and excited about the new state funding for schools.

Our mantra, we are getting better at that, is that our taxpayers are going to pay more and they are going to get less.

We probably will have budget reductions over the next four years.

Partly, so when the Times printed the list, we were still I think number one in the state in terms of the revenues that we got.

And the funding was pretty flat.

But, they are going to take money away from one pocket, they are going to launder it at the state level, they are going to give it back to us and say that they have met McCleary and we are going to be left holding the bag for the things that our taxpayers have voted for in the past and we no longer have money for it.

So that hence is why we will have to be doing some belt tightening going forward.

So we will continue to work on that, they continue to say there will be another legislative session, it would be nice if they ended earlier than June and hopefully they will address some of those things.

We were denied our opportunity to enter an amicus brief, friend of the court, with regard to the upcoming continued ruling on McCleary.

So we are part of the news lawsuit and the news lawsuit will be the primary bringer of that, whatever you call it, motion or whatever.

and we have submitted our material to them and through them but the state argued that since we were part of news we couldn't have another bite of the apple and come in and make our own presentation.

We do continue to work with the news media and we will continue to work with our partners and our parents to explain where we are.

So I guess I should hasten to add we are fine for opening school in the fall.

We have done our heavy lift, we have cut our $40 million out of the budget.

It is what it is.

We have got a good program going forward.

Nothing disastrous will happen in the short term.

Longer term we continue to be highly concerned about the news.

Two-tier bell time, kind of old news except that it's new news so we moved the bell times a year ago and now we will move to two tiers instead of three thanks to the support from the city of Seattle to get us started with that.

And then a bunch of new systems underway and I'm sure that many of these will come with good news and a certain amount of angst as we learn new systems.

So student registration, online enrollment, we are working the bugs out on that for people that don't have ready access to online enrollment.

Our online payments point of sale is happening at our high schools and will be rolling out throughout the rest of the district as we get better at implementing that.

We've got a new online management system for our medical records.

We've got a school data portal that will allow schools to take all of their data and put it in one place and be able to get it out.

So hopefully it will move us beyond either back of the napkin or Excel spreadsheets so that schools can easily access their data and use it in real-time.

Our third goal is our school family and community engagement.

Director Burke and I had the opportunity to sit in on the ethnic studies meeting here a day or so ago.

Great conversations about how to implement and whether we implement everywhere all the time versus how many people do we train when we go forward.

And I really like the, I forget the term they use, I call it the word standard.

The standard number one is kind of understanding the past greatness of each culture.

Standard number two is the oppression that most ethnic groups have suffered.

Standard number three is the liberation portion of that and how that comes about and standard number four is Kind of taking care of implicit bias going forward and creating fair and equitable places The African-American advisory committee continues to work.

They've got preliminary recommendations that are being finalized for September 28. Director Harris has worked with Kerry Campbell on our two-way engagement process so we are pleased to have thought exchange as our new digital tool that will allow us to do a better job of interacting with our community.

We were delighted that we've got school messenger back and we are able to communicate much better now with particularly our families that have other languages.

So I didn't do them in all those languages I only did them in English but others came and helped me out and so we were able to send that message out that just went out I think recently.

Welcoming people back and that will go out to many of our families in their primary language.

And then I mentioned the new websites that are out there.

Coming up, ribbon cuttings, Olympic Hills, and Meany tomorrow, noon and 4 PM.

Excited about that.

And again, several of our directors were there on those tours.

We will also have tours following the ribbon cuttings here in the next few days.

And then on September 5, we will do Cascadia, Licton Springs, and Robert Eagle Staff.

I could comment on each one of those, actually my Friday memo did have comments on each of them, but I won't do that right now.

I'll just mention Meany.

Wow, Meany has had many, many, many, many, many manifestations from 1902 to the present, and up until recently had four renditions that were glued together kind of like Whatever.

You couldn't get from one part of the building to another without walking all the way down one hallway and all the way back another.

And it was amazing.

The architects did a really nice job of taking all of that and putting it back together at a very reasonable price.

It looks and feels just like the other schools.

So the first thing they did was they took us into the entry, which was at street level rather than having to go down into the dingy sublevel there.

And, you could look both ways.

You could look one down one hallway, and you could look down another hallway, which is almost the exact same thing that the architects told us in our brand-new schools.

Is that, hey, we've got great visibility from the office.

So, architects did really cool on that, and for any of us who had the opportunity to be in the old building, I can't quite appreciate it enough in that they did awesome work on that.

Community interest, waitlist, the board acted July 5 with regard to a couple of changes in the waitlist process, most notably Whitman and Robert Eagle staff and then matched pairings between high school students.

551 new choice assignments were made using those processes over the summer which meant a total of 3518 students got their choice out of 5900 students.

And the waitlist I think dissolved tomorrow or the next day.

Potential school at Fort Lawton has continued to express an item of interest and I think coming up here in just a few minutes we've got quite a few people that want to testify on that.

We have worked closely with the city and with the U.S.

Department of Education and I don't think any of us like the requirements that the U.S.

Office of Education has in terms of their definition of what it means to have immediate need and immediate funding but we don't meet that definition.

We certainly, as many have pointed out, would love to have the property and probably could make a case that somewhere outside of the US office of education definitions we have a need.

I guess I take solace from the standpoint that the city, when and if they get a title, They have tentative title for 30 years and during that timeframe if they change the designation they go back through the process again.

So I think that opens a window for us to go back through the process at some point in time when if we have need and after we see what the city does with their planned affordable housing on that site.

It is not ideal, our staff went out and looked at it, it does have terrain changes and it does have landmark buildings on it.

Probably would work for an elementary school.

So I think that we can come back and talk about that at another point in the future but we just don't seem to meet the definition at this point.

Seattle center has been in the news not quite accurately so we have entered into an agreement with the city of Seattle to spend about $20,000 and have all of the parties who are interested in Seattle center come forward and talk about what they need and see what the different potentials are for fitting all of those needs onto that site.

For us, we have been very clear that we need the stadium site, there is just no other place in the city to put that.

We need parking for the stadium site, and unless somebody has a miracle somewhere, we need the high school site at some time fairly soon.

The city, no promises, but the city wants to make this work.

Other people want to make it work.

So we are talking about other potential places on the Seattle Center property for a high school and some that are nearby and I think we had a I don't know what to call it, a table in the Friday memo that showed some of those sites that are being considered, and some of the pros and cons for each of those sites.

So we are not very far into it, we don't have detailed cost estimates, but we are trying to look at what the different possibilities are.

We are not giving away anybody's rights to final approval.

The school board will still have the right to finally approve.

And the way it got reported in the paper was that the city and the school district were going to design a high school together.

Not really.

The design is how do we make it all fit on the Seattle Center property and then after those decisions would be made, we would each go forward with our own design.

We would still continue to design our high school with our ed specs.

But that is way down the road somewhere.

Crossing guards were part of the budget cuts that we, that the board approved.

We went to the city with the hopes that we might be able to get that funded.

They tried and they came back and they said doesn't really fit under the family and education levy.

So we have been scrambling trying to find funding here.

So we are in the process of moving forward keeping some of the crossing guards.

Looking for funding for those, and I don't know what word to use, being more rigorous in our criteria for crossing guards so that we have them, we probably need them everywhere, but so that we have them in our highest need areas, and some of the other areas we will be discontinuing crossing guards.

Online registration system I mentioned, there are some concerns with the online registration system, particularly from some of our homeless advocates.

FAO in our enrollment center has gone out and met with many of those advocates.

Seattle Housing Authority has stepped up and worked with us.

McKinney-Vento homeless office has worked through that and I think that we have fixes for all of those but we will continue to work with anyone that we need to work with to make sure that we are not kind of blocking anyone out of that system.

And then as I mentioned at the beginning of my remarks, it is absolutely amazing how many new seats we have opened up, how much good work has been put in place, and we do have a start of school meeting that happens, used to happen at 7 AM, I think it happens at 8 AM now, where we get together and we make our checklist of all of the things that aren't done yet, and who is on it, and when we get back together tomorrow who is going to follow up on that particular item.

That list is much shorter than it has been in the past, however, we do have 10 or so portables that didn't quite make it in under the deadline.

So we have been working with the schools to get alternate plans for how they house students, and how we make the best of that situation until we get those portables in place.

So part of it is just our volume, getting the contractor to build them, and then the city allows us to move one per night, so we have to work through all of those things.

And then we've had the concrete workers, and then we have the construction trades, and all of those pieces are feeling the stress.

We have 62 cranes in downtown Seattle trying to get good things built for everybody.

Anyway we are behind on 10 of those portables but working hard to catch up.

And finally with good news Hawthorne Elementary was recognized for the third year in a row by Johns Hopkins University for their outstanding leadership in parent engagement and that was one of the replication sessions that we had.

at SLI and it was standing room only and a nice hot upstairs room at Garfield and everybody was busily taking notes from Sandra on all of the cool things that she does to engage parents.

I will be there at Hawthorne on the first day of school and we are all excited about opening school.

Literacy project, Council of great city schools invited Seattle to be one of three school districts interacting with Nashville schools that uses a balanced literacy professional development process like we do.

And invited us to come in and work and learn alongside of Nashville in that work.

So we are excited about that.

Likewise, AASA invited us to be one of five school districts to be called out in a national publication on what we can do for positive preventative closing the gap behavior.

And so we were delighted to do that online interview recently and getting the final information to them and look forward to seeing what that looks like.

And then the 13th year is a promise scholarship for any of our seniors so far until now it's been in the South portion of the district and pioneered by South Seattle colleges.

Heavy lift for them and for their foundation I think four schools plus some of our interagency and middle college high schools.

That if you graduate on time, and if you have a need, and you want to go to Seattle colleges, they will guarantee absolutely positively scholarship.

So the promise part of it is really exciting.

For some kids that might not think about going to college, or might not think that they have the wherewithal to do that, it's just awesome.

And then the city of Seattle, the mayor put in after the summit, I think it was $6 million which was really seed money for north and central Seattle campuses to start their own program.

So it was, I don't think the money was for scholarships, the money was for who do you need to work in your foundation to go out and raise the money for scholarships.

So Ingram just let us know that North Seattle College has announced that they will be the first outside of the South Seattle College area that will be offered that opportunity for this coming year.

That's for me, that's kind of one of the exciting parts about kind of the partnership work we've been doing with the city, and ideally with some of our CBOs in this case.

Seattle Colleges, the mayor is trying to launch before he leaves office an education roundtable that he discussed with Director Patu and Director Peters and I a couple of months ago.

With this idea that we would have district representation, city representation, and some of our community partners to do… I think Jill Wakefield, the former Chancellor from Seattle Colleges was, what would it take to lift up a Seattle wide 13th year promise that says every student in Seattle has that opportunity?

And we've got a short list, the mayor has a short list, but there's many others.

I can never remember what it's called our team reads one that we hear in the fall that we are all excited about that would be another one that if we could lift that up citywide that would be awesome.

So that's my report and wow we are running fast and the school year is starting and we've got hundreds and thousands of employees out there making good things happen for kids.

Thank you very much superintendent Nyland.

So we do not have any student comments this evening so that brings us to the consent portion of tonight's agenda.

May I have a motion for the consent agenda?

I move we approve the consent agenda.

I second the motion.

The consent agenda has been moved and seconded.

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

Okay.

Seeing none, all in favor of the consent agenda say aye.

All opposed?

The consent agenda has passed.

So we have now reached the public testimony portion of the agenda but it's not yet 530. So I would ask any directors who would like to give their comments now to speak now or at least begin now and then we will begin testimony at 530 and come back to director comments if there is a need or desire to do so.

So would anyone like to speak at this time?

Director Burke thank you.

Thank you.

I will try to follow the same theme as our agenda and set a trend by being hopefully brief and concise.

Many of the topics that are of interest to directors and the public and that are hot topics were covered quite well by Superintendent Nyland.

So I just want to touch on a couple of things.

Specifically welcoming all the new principals, we wish them success, we wish them amazing experiences in our schools, and the opportunity to be supported by their peers, central staff, and the board.

Being part of the adventure.

And the other thing that this was my second summer as part of Seattle Public Schools and so the question of what happens during the summer for SPS is something that I'm learning more and more about.

Because there is a mix of vacation and then also sort of preparing the ship for the next year's journey.

And I know that a lot of staff took vacations.

but I know that there was also a huge hive of activity working on strategic work, systems work, opening our new buildings, you know I was able to tour some of the buildings and see people that normally I see in the central office like aren't you with dots?

Aren't you an instructional technology person?

Oh, okay, you are out there helping get these buildings going.

So keeping the enterprise moving, having learned more about that this summer makes me really question whether it would even be possible to do year-round school.

Because that is an important break.

I want to build a little bit on what Dr. Nyland said on the ethnic studies task force.

They have had several meetings as a task force and then there is also workgroups that are doing breakout work on actually developing curriculum materials and resources.

And this is a super dedicated group of people.

They are now working under the leadership of Dr. Andrea Drake.

The standards or themes that Dr. Nyland spoke about, the four themes, are inspired by the work of Oakland public schools.

One of the things that I learned at this last meeting last week was how We are kind of in the middle of the implementation in terms of there are other districts that are out in front of us that are breaking the ground, and there are a lot of districts that are way behind us, and so we have, there is a lot of materials that we can draw on.

So we are not truly working in this arena where we have to create new all the time.

So I just wanted to really emphasize that the folks that are working on that are enthusiastic about getting things moving and developing content that actually can be shared and vetted at schools or pilot schools as soon as even this year.

One of the other things that I had the pleasure of doing just last week was attending the Native American murals dedication at the Cascadia and Robert Eagle Staff site.

There were I believe two of them and I attended the second one.

I was out of town so I was not able to attend the first one where Director Pinkham I heard gave some eloquent words.

So, I have to say I learned a ton from Andrew Morrison, the artist that created them, about what each of the individual figures represented and the stories behind it.

And also just from talking to people in the audience that were essentially the local historians about the cultural significance and the history of the site as a spiritual and healing site.

So, it was informative for me.

Each of the buildings, the Robert Eagle Staff and Cascadia buildings have an interactive display that describes some of the history and some of the work in the murals.

There is a YouTube video that describes a little bit about the creation and the movement of the murals and getting them set up.

I just can't overemphasize how cool that is that the community that's that really helped elevate those and the district and the capital staff really came together and it felt like in some ways sort of a healing process just by getting all of those pieces in place at that site.

So it was really powerful for me.

I do not have a public meeting scheduled yet but I will by our next meeting.

I will defer on conversations on hot topics until after public testimony.

Thank you.

Director Harris Harris we lost an extraordinary teacher last Wednesday.

Janet Osborne.

Watch and learn.

Thank you.

Thank you for that.

We do a lot of things well in this district and Janet Osborne is a real testament to that and she is but one of extraordinary teachers.

that are assisting all of our 54,000 children.

And all of our 54,000 children deserve that kind of a great start.

And if we can't honor the people that do us honor then we ought not be here.

Appreciate it and Carrie Campbell, Nate Van Duzer, David Dockendorf, thanks very much for helping put that together.

Director Harris thank you very much for initiating that and doing that.

I understand the first draft was a difficult project but beautifully beautifully done.

Thank you.

Would anyone else like to speak at this time?

Director Pinkham thank you.

so I have until 530?

No.

Qeˀciyéẁyéẁ and tāˀc kulé-wit I thank you and good evening.

It has been a quick summer and glad to be back and I guess one of the first things I put in our notes here is to have everyone's thoughts and prayers and minds go out to those suffering from Hurricane Harvey.

It's very devastating what's happening down there to their schools.

I'm part of a community or association of multicultural programs and Texas A&M had to shut down for a while because of what they experienced.

So I can understand what the schools themselves have to go through, their families.

So thoughts and prayers out to people in those communities that are impacted.

Definitely welcome back to the students teachers and staff and administrators to the 2017-18 school year.

And thank you to the new principals that showed up earlier.

Hopefully we will see good things come with basically starting a new year.

Just like with the eclipse that we had, some of the native communities out there look at that as just another sign of change, a sign of renewal.

So it's for some people to be amazed that they usually think that a lot of tribes are superstitious, but they knew how to track lunar calendars, the solar calendars, and they knew.

This was a sign of change.

Hopefully we can jump on with that.

changes coming and changes here such as a new bell times, early release days, like I talked about yesterday, people have welcomed it, there is some, is this going to be something that is going to work for us?

But hopefully everyone will acknowledge that it is something that we can see as hopefully an opportunity that change.

What value can you find from it and continue to proceed onwards and upwards?

Congratulations to the new schools opening this year.

Particularly close to me would be the Robert Eagle Staff Middle School in Licton Springs K-8 along with Cascadia will open on the former Wilson Pacific site which does have cultural significance to the first inhabitants of this area.

I do want to thank principal Omari Campbell and welcome back to Urban Native Education Alliance to that site where they can work out of and help serve students in the Seattle school district.

I do not want to overlook the needs for our current schools as well because with their new schools opening we still have a lot of current schools and buildings that are in need of fix and repair and hopefully we will see we can do this.

Because I think some of our schools are out there saying I'm tired of hearing wait for the next levy, wait for the next levy and with these new changes in the system can they indeed wait for the next levy?

What can we spend the levy monies on?

What can we raise it for?

So hopefully we can work with the state out there to make sure all of our buildings are up and ready to go to equitably educate all of our youth out there.

I kind of mentioned it as far as it just being a time of recovery and with the new things that are coming along.

So I hope everyone takes on the perspective.

We will hopefully nurture those things that work for us and look at those that haven't and move the school district forward.

I don't have a community meeting scheduled yet but same as Director Burke I will hopefully announce one next week for our next regular board meeting in September so we can start hearing from our community.

I'm looking at trying to arrange a meeting to go out to Leschi who got invited out there by Michael, how do you pronounce his last name, Tamayo?

To arrange to go and visit that school.

And as we talk about a new high school, you know we hear things about Fort Lawn, we hear about the Seattle Center and the Memorial Stadium.

So I guess I'll just put my two cents in here.

If we were to talk about a new high school, it would be nice to open a new high school called American Indian Heritage High School.

Just something to think about.

Qeˀciyéẁyéẁ, thank you.

Thank you Scott.

Anyone else like to speak at this time?

Director Geary thank you.

Director Geary Welcome back everybody.

Fall is such an exciting time of the year.

You get so excited the weather starts to change, kids are coming back to school, that sense of renewal and I think after this summer we had this sort of The warm days, the smoke, and now it's time for it all to clear out and for everybody to return to school bright-eyed and ready to learn.

And that's how I approach the year.

And that's exciting.

We have new principals in our school and it was lovely to get to meet them and recognize them.

We have new schools and I know for the families and the kids that get to go to those schools that will That's always exciting.

I think that that does a lot to invigorate anybody to see a beautiful environment.

And so the more that we can do and remember that we still have families and schools that need that makeover.

So that we know that that will have a big impact on the families that go to some of our schools that have been waiting for that remodel.

I had the pleasure to attend the summer leadership Institute and I think the lovely thing about that is that it demonstrates that we are treating our leaders like professionals.

We are giving them an opportunity to get together, get some professional development, but mostly to interact with each other.

and I thought that that was great.

I know that they appreciated that a lot because while we all know somebody can sit at the front of the room and lecture, it's the connection in the relationships that they get to make with each other, and then when they are out in their buildings and talking or running up against issues that they have a connection and a community now that they know and can talk with.

I so appreciate that event and the excitement that people expressed for those efforts.

I don't have a lot to say today.

I do want to put everybody on notice that one of the issues that I think comes up and that we heard a lot towards the end of the year and now is going to be the time for us to start looking at it is going to be the student assignment plan.

And so I know that that has been a big issue about how we do it, what are the procedures, what are the unwritten procedures, how is this happening, how is it being developed?

Now is the time if you want to have input on that to start thinking about it, look over the student assignment plan and contact your board directors, attend their community meetings, do it proactively and that way we will have a chance to look at it with a critical eye and make sure that your interests are being expressed through the student assignment plan.

I am particularly interested in making sure that we are able to meet the individual needs of our children with disabilities through that process.

I know I've heard from over the year starting in February you start hearing from families about their concerns about how their kids are going to be addressed, and their needs are going to be addressed.

It's always the tension between we are treating kids like everybody else, but let's always remember there are certain kids out there where their individual needs are what we need to be able to meet.

And so we will be looking specifically at that as that process rolls out.

But rather than waiting, think about that now.

I know wait lists, all of those issues that have been so important to people over the last year and we heard so much about, now is our time to bring a critical eye to it and work on that.

I'm going to start again with my morning meetings with the bell time schedule change it will be a little bit different I won't be able to do the 730 meeting because now I have to get my daughter to school at 8 o'clock but maybe right after that so if you are interested in that go to my school board webpage or Facebook page and I usually post on that, whether or not I'm able to make that morning meeting.

It's hard to know in advance because things come up with school with kids that make it really difficult.

But if you're interested in it, if you're able to go check in the morning, see if I'm doing it, and I always post to let people know I'm there, and I will be also posting for my community meeting this year.

I'm going to really work hard to see if I can get my meetings down.

in the Magnuson area because I know we've heard a lot about what's been happening in Sandpoint and it's of great concern to the families in my district what they can do to help.

And one of the things that was posted is that The families in the Sandpoint housing really want to feel part of the community.

And the way we can do that is go down and be present in their community.

Make sure that when we are at the playgrounds playing that we introduce ourselves, that we make those connections, we make those relationships, that we are part of their community.

We make the effort to go to them because they don't have for many reasons.

They need to stay within their community and that is upon the families who want to go in there and do that reaching out to go there.

So I'm going to do my part and I'm going to really work hard to use the Magnuson community center even go into the park and meet.

So look for that and I hope that families will join me even if it does mean sitting under an outdoor at one of the outdoor picnics in the shelter on a chilly day in our fall sweaters to talk about Seattle Public Schools and what we can do to make them great.

Thank you.

Peters Thank you Director Geary.

Director Patu.

Director Patu Hello I just want to welcome all the new principals and the old principals back to school year.

Our new school year and I'm looking forward to also welcoming all our parents and students to our new school year.

I really appreciate attending the summer Institute summit.

I have had conversation with some of the principals and they tell me that it is one of the best summits that the district has sponsored in a long time.

And I think they are right.

I thought they were very interested in a lot of the areas that were discussed at the summit.

So congratulations staff, superintendent for a job well done.

And also it's been a very long summer and I'm glad it's another year has come upon us and it's been also a great summer.

Finally able to take some time off this year and be able to get away from Seattle and it's It's actually nice to be able to take some time off and come back and start fresh.

So I really think this is going to be a good year and hopefully that we will be able to accomplish a lot of things that we said we were going to do and hopefully continue on to make a difference in areas that we need to improve on and as we discussed we talked about the waitlist and I know I've got a lot of emails on the waitlist but we are hoping that we can continue to go through that and make some good choices in terms of how do we move that in a positive direction.

So welcome everyone back for a good hopefully a good wonderful year this year.

Peters Thank you Director Patu.

Director Blanford.

I joined my colleagues in welcoming the new principals to Seattle Public Schools.

I had a chance to meet some of them at the meeting that was held and I believe really strongly I think all of us up here believe really strongly That leadership, particularly building-based leadership is a really crucial element in our ability to improve instruction for all of our students and to close our opportunity gaps.

And so I celebrate and encourage you to exert that leadership in your buildings this year.

I was thrilled to have the opportunity to walk through the building with Superintendent Nyland, the Meany middle school building and I'm very excited to participate in the ribbon-cutting ceremony tomorrow.

That building in many ways was labyrinthine.

It was very difficult to get from one place to another.

As we were walking through last week it felt like a transformed building.

I think it will be great for the students that are coming to school there and the staff that we saw that were busy getting the rooms ready for them.

I think it's going to be an exciting year for all involved.

I was really happy to hear that Hawthorne Elementary School won the John Hopkins award for community engagement and I hope that serves as an exemplar to all of the principals and school communities about what can be done to reach out to communities and engage with them in authentic ways.

that enlist their involvement in their individual schools.

I think that is a crucial factor in whether or not we are going to continue to make the progress that we are very proud of.

And as I was listening to my colleagues talking I was thinking a little bit about a couple of years ago at the start of school when my opportunity came to speak And I referenced the fact that there had been a number of incidences that were precipitated by a racial incident that happened somewhere in our country.

And as I was listening to my colleagues today it made me reflect a little bit on what happened in Charlottesville a few weeks ago.

And back then I said that I think that it is crucial that our educators to the extent possible, if they feel comfortable, that they take this opportunity to have a teaching moment with their students.

The students that I have encountered since Charlottesville happened are very interested in having an understanding of what happened.

I think in a city like ours there is a great opportunity to educate, to engage our students.

That said, the same warning or caveat that I issued then I will issue again now.

Those conversations are very difficult and many people come at them from really different perspectives and whereas those perspectives need to be all engaged and taken seriously I think it's also important that those who are facilitating those conversations have some training.

because those conversations can spin out of control and can lead to a school or a classroom that can be perceived as hostile to some.

And so it is critically important that our educators, if they have not done so already, access the materials that are readily available so that they can engage with all of their students in the most respectful way.

I looked at the teaching tolerance website recently and they have updated a number of their materials so that educators around the country can go into those conversations with their students in a way that they can provide leadership and guidance and support for their students who are hungry to understand the complicated situation that is taking place in Charlottesville and across the nation.

So I wanted to go not last but second to last because I was busy trying to secure some community meetings while online.

And I was fortunate that I was able to do that.

The Seattle Public Library's system now will allow you to actually make the reservations.

They don't tell you that they are confirmed.

So, I will give you these dates and hope that I get confirmation and will make sure and let our staff know so that it can be loaded up on the website.

But I have a meeting scheduled for September the 23rd.

from 10 to 12 o'clock and that is scheduled at the Douglas truth library as is the one that is in October on the 28th.

Also from 10 to 12. I think that might be my last community meeting.

So hopefully there will be lots of people there and it will be as robust a conversation as they always were.

Finally, if anyone noticed that I came into this room a little bit late, didn't get a chance to engage with many of the new principals, that was because I chose to stay at home for a little while today because my rising ninth grader came back from orientation As a family that has been involved in Seattle Public Schools for another number of years, I used to work in this building.

My wife has a 20-year career in Seattle Public Schools and our only beloved child started as a kindergartner in Seattle Public Schools and now is going to be a rising ninth grader.

at Garfield high school.

It was a pretty profound moment to just think about the involvement that we've had in Seattle Public Schools and our treasured daughter now moving on to the last stage of her Seattle Public Schools experience.

And so I got a chance to engage with her a little bit and to discover that her concerns about making friends were not well placed.

She said she had 10 new friends when she came home today so I knew that that was going to be the case so I wasn't very worried about it.

But as someone who has worked for Seattle Public Schools and serves on the board and you know has entrusted our daughter's future to Seattle Public Schools I just want to take this opportunity at the beginning of the year to to say thanks to all of the educators who have been involved in, that I've worked with, that have worked with my child or my wife, and that have worked really hard for all 54,000 students that we have in the district.

I'm looking forward to great things happening in 2017-18 and I will be watching intently even though I won't necessarily be on standing up or sitting up here after December 1 or whenever our last meeting is.

So thank you.

And I look forward to talking to you soon.

Peters Thank you Director Blanford.

Director Harris.

Again thank you Carrie Nate for assisting on that tribute to Janet.

It's hard to say goodbye to somebody that made such a big difference in your and your child's life and in a school community.

To say that the Pathfinder community right now is grieving is an understatement on the other hand that's what communities for.

is to help each other get through it.

Jenna had a blog and she talked about education she talked about dying and here are the two salmon clan books and you are welcome to look at those during the break and I encourage you to do so because what it does is it emphasizes creative teaching.

It emphasizes teaching across the disciplines and having young people exploring how the connections work.

Poetry, art, their bodies.

Those young people now, most every one of them is in college and are rock stars.

And certainly they have had the benefit of privilege but mostly they had the benefit of an extraordinary start and a thoughtful tight community and an incredibly hardworking teacher.

And I know that this district is full of those kind of folks.

Things I've been up to.

July 15 we had a very rowdy community engagement meeting out in West Seattle district 6. Capacity challenges are right on the top of the list.

And welcome to district 6 Mr. Aramaki.

And we had lasagna.

And it was good.

On August 15 we had a group of PTSA parents from throughout district six to figure out ways to help each other.

We hear a lot about high need schools in the southeast.

Not so much in other districts and we certainly have them in West Seattle and South Park.

And we need ways to work with each other to lift each other up.

On that note Highland Park and Roxhill now going to EC Hughes need new playgrounds.

And new schools get new playgrounds but title I schools don't get new playgrounds so they have to go out and raise the money themselves.

I have asked staff if they could put that piece into the race and equity tool and if we can figure out better ways to get where we need to be.

Because if you don't have a PTSA how do you raise those funds?

How is that equitable?

Capacity is a big deal out in West Seattle.

We've been talking about having a capacity carnival.

Associate superintendent Herndon is going to help us do that.

We're going to make it a party.

It's going to be rowdy.

As I'm sure you all recall on June 1st associate superintendent Herndon and facilities director Best were booed off the stage at Boren pre-K 8. by parents that don't understand our process and we need to do a better job and we are going to do a better job of explaining that and thinking outside the box.

Fort Lawton.

I've heard from a number of folks in this room and a number of folks in this room have heard from me.

I don't accept no as an answer, never have, probably never will.

Do I appreciate that the Department of education is personal opinion?

Ill-functioning presently?

Do I appreciate that there are lots of regulations?

I do but I've also spent my other career 35 years changing those kinds of regulations and going to people like Senator Patty Murray and others and asking them to change those regulations.

I also believe that land banking by the time we get through the crazy we will have that need.

No question about it.

And I also think that we can do a much better job of explaining our story.

Especially during the times that we aren't having regular Friday memos and we are not having as many board meetings.

And I think we will do that and I think we will learn some more here during public testimony.

Amici briefs were filed today in McCleary.

The website is AC period courts.wa.gov there are a number of community organizations that have worked very hard to assist us in our everlasting journey for equity for our children.

I encourage you to read them I encourage you to say thank you to the organizations that have worked so very very hard.

little miffed at the Supreme Court that they didn't allow us to put our own amicus brief in however I'm really proud of this district that we were ready to go that we anticipated it and we could take our really solid work product and share it with Tom Ahern of the news lead attorney so that it did not go for not.

And if we are not anticipatory and all teed up then we would have missed the opportunity.

So props to you all, thank you very much for that.

Back to Fort Lawton and the city.

I am awaiting the day where the Seattle Public Schools has a seat at the table for the hollow conversations.

The fact that we do not is mind-blowing to me.

And I suspect that both mayoral candidates will be getting those questions and I hope they get them from a great number of people.

I want to follow up on Superintendent Nyland's comments with respect to South Seattle College in the 13th year.

One of the things that is so extraordinary about the 13th year is the wraparound services and the onboarding process.

You are at college, what do you do?

Well we are going to show you, we are going to help you, and we are going to be there for you.

So it's not go get your college credit.

young people it's I'm here to help you come to me and or I'm watching you and I'm going to help you because I see you're not making it.

And that kind of as we all know personal relationship really matters.

And just because they are 18 doesn't mean they are going to be rock stars without those kinds of relationships.

I want a little pushback here on some of the things I've read about the CSIPs.

It is in fact a new day on the CSIPs and I am told that we are going to hear more about them from the podium and from Chief Starosky and I am really proud of the fact that it is a new day for the CSIPs.

This is not rubber stamp time and no your board has not looked the other way.

And with all due respect for folks that want to cast a wide brush I challenge you to understand the facts behind those statements.

Because frankly it hurts.

And we don't deserve it.

And we are making progress and I'm proud of that progress and it's an honor to sit up here with my colleagues who all care.

Thank you.

Thank you Director Harris.

So the directors will have an opportunity to respond to public testimony after public testimony as well.

So we have now reached 530 a little bit beyond and we will go on to public testimony.

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

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

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

When the two minutes have ended please conclude your remarks.

Ms. Shek will read off the testimony speakers names.

Thank you.

First up for public testimony we have Chris Jackins followed by Daniel Dickinson and Valerie Cooper.

My name is Chris Jackins Box 84063 Seattle 98124. On the solar energy contract four points number one the contract has goals for minority owned business of 10% but the plan would provide 0%.

Number two, the guaranteed annual energy savings is $59,000.

The total project cost is $2.3 million.

This means that the project will break even in 38 years.

Number three, 38 years is longer than school district roofs last.

And longer than paying for the district headquarters.

Number four, so the project seems to be a giveaway of public money and the district won't give a cut to minority, women, veteran, and small businesses.

Please vote now.

On deaf and hard of hearing DHH issues.

Some months back district staff promised to publish an update on DHH issues.

Laura Gramer a member of the DHH community said to mention to you that she is still interested in seeing the memo.

On the League of Education voters $2 million grant to South Shore.

Four points, number one is this grant consistent with state efforts to equalize state funding between districts?

Number two, the agreement requires the district to provide pre-K transportation.

Is pre-K transportation covered by state funding?

Number three, the grant agreement has two sections labeled number five.

Number four, the foundation gets a special say in selecting the principal.

Giving wealthy donors special rights in public schools is a mistake.

Please vote no.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Daniel Dickinson.

Good evening directors, Superintendent Nyland, my name is Dan Dickinson.

I live in Magnolia, I have a rising kindergartner starting in just a few days at Lawton.

I am here tonight just to implore you as part of your stewardship of this district to push hard as a board and look deeply into the strategic issue of putting a school at the Fort Lawton site.

It's really going to be a once-in-a-century opportunity at this point to place a school in Greenfield, free land, in the heart of a neighborhood that needs more capacity.

Right now in Seattle everyone knows upzoning, changing zoning, massive influxes of people are happening all around us, and that is not going to change.

The changes that have happened to make this town so prosperous are not going to go away anytime soon.

And it's really, really important that we look hard at your numbers to make sure those projections are accurate.

I know many of us in the community feel like those projections are not accurate and we don't want to be in a situation, sounds like maybe West Seattle is in a situation now where there is a dramatic capacity crisis.

Even if today it doesn't feel like there is an immediate need, when I hear immediate need I also think crisis point.

It's time to, again, as the strategic leaders of this district, look hard at an option that will keep us out of that immediate need, keep us out of those crisis situations, and capitalize on a once in a very, very long time opportunity that you have at Fort Lawton.

I really hope that as part of that we can look at doing either a stem program or perhaps a native heritage program.

It would be a great location obviously for either being so near to discovery Park and to the burning white bear Center out in Magnolia.

So you're going to hear more about this tonight but please as the stewards and leaders of this district get involved, do what you have to do to change the regulations if that's what has to happen.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

After Valerie Cooper we will have Lisa Evans, Jessica Smith, and Eric Blumenhagen.

Hi Valerie Cooper here.

Number one, school improvement plans are to be data-driven.

It's integral that the data is correct.

CSIPs cannot be achieved if capacity challenges are threatening to the functioning of schools.

Number two, regarding the importance of accurate data.

We disagree that our Fort Lawton school movement is out of sync with an immediate or imminent need for capacity.

We are saying capacity issues are bigger than identified by SPS and the increased number of students in our cluster is going to substantially outpace growth projections.

This is why an opportunity for free land is necessary to capitalize upon.

Be clear that you are hearing us say that we fear a capacity crisis.

This is based off of what we see with the right size classroom capacity projections, not even correct McCleary numbers which will require more classrooms.

Why a crisis?

We see 59 three-bedroom plus townhouse development going up at 10th and McGraw and Queen Anne.

It got passed through the city claiming fewer than five children.

at the development.

Upzoning, densification, young families, thousands of Amazon employees moving in and it's not slowing down.

We've lost schools in our cluster and we do not have adequate representation on HALA thus this is a point to be addressed.

In the letter to the office of housing Magnolia Elementary was stated as having 500 seats which would be added to our cluster.

This is not in fact true.

The students are shifting out of 17 portables, teacher lounges, computer labs, and hallways within the cluster.

There will be no open seats at Magnolia Elementary when it opens.

Capacity crisis?

It could be alleviated.

However, if a school is not built at Fort Lawton site, 150 family units will be built at Fort Lawton site.

That could use 100 to 400 students when we're automatically at an immediate need for a new building and would be experiencing a capacity crisis.

We are asking you to be proactive and not reactive.

We formally request that the school board of directors be given an opportunity to give an up or down vote asking for a school to be added to the EIS at Fort Lawton.

No stone unturned consider Patty Marie as an option as well.

Thank you very much.

You also have handouts for me.

Approval of schools and that CSIPs be data-driven promote a positive impact on school learning and includes a continuous improvement process while a noble concept to hold school sites accountable to, why is the equivalent not happening at the executive level at this district?

Data-driven should only include test scores, teacher performance and ensuring families engagement.

But also what we have learned from our past.

All of this should be happening from the top down.

There must be accountability for the performance of senior staff to engage, respond to and work with the public and partners.

Accountability to demonstrate due diligence.

Accountability that staff tasked with the job must provide accurate data and projections.

School clusters cannot plan accordingly when management continually fails to be proactive, to plan, to work, or even to listen to community partners who have the most accurate information and insight.

Be that task forces, city planners, permits office, DOH, HALA, or the families that continually bring to downtown's attention issues like capacity constraints, abysmal building conditions, the crush of preschoolers and new families in all of our neighborhoods.

Asking schools to continue to improve and positively impact learning cannot and will not happen if downtown is not equally transparent or committed to that same process.

Passing on Fort Lawton is indicative of the senior staff's failure to do all of these things.

Did no one learn anything from Sandpoint Elementary?

The city's commitment to low income housing translates to customers for public schools.

Is there school planning for the housing at Fort Lawton?

No.

The superintendent's August 7 letter to the office of housing says no one from the DOE responded to our emails or calls.

How sad.

No family has ever dealt with that when they are advocating for a student, have they?

Saying out of one side of your mouth that there is no immediate need, then pleading out of the other side to tell us about any potential land and building is disingenuous.

This last Friday's memo said that there was only one recent public, there was only recent public interest in the site.

Really?

Please.

For four years my, Diane, Casper and others have personally asked capital and facilities to look and consider the Fort Lawton site.

That is not recent.

This same memo highlights several calls took place with the city and with the DOE.

But didn't the superintendent's letter say on August 7 that they could not reach the DOE?

Which is it?

So are you going to hold downtown accountable on their failure to adhere to what you are then asking schools to do?

Thank you.

Hi my name is Jessica Smith, thanks for the opportunity to speak with you.

I am the mother of a preschooler and a second grader at Catherine Blaine.

I am here to ask that the school board be involved in any decision regarding school district use of the free land at Fort Lawton.

Please don't let your engagement end with Dr. Nyland's letter to Seattle's office of housing.

It was alarming to hear in his letter that the Department of Education did not return repeated phone calls and emails to help the district pursue this free land.

But I urge you not to throw your hands up.

Ask our state senators for help.

Patty Murray is the ranking member of the Senate Education Committee.

Please give this opportunity the effort it deserves.

A quick drive through Magnolia and Queen Anne will show you new houses and new townhomes being built.

A glance at the Seattle Times headlines just this past weekend will show you the news of the ever-increasing influx of people to businesses like Amazon and beyond.

Our city is booming and our schools need to respond accordingly.

We are simply out of space now and it is only going to get worse.

The district must improve its projection numbers and understand our true capacity needs before turning down free land that could be used for a school.

The housing at Fort Lawton is slated to include 150 new units alone.

Where will the children in these families go to school?

On 38 acres of land why can't we build both a school and affordable housing?

Affordable housing and overcapacity are pressing issues in our community and this land could alleviate both.

Please don't walk away from this opportunity.

Fight for it.

Fight for our kids.

Thank you.

Peters Thank you.

Shek Next up we have Eric Blumhagen followed by Ethan Rogers and Alex Cooper.

Hello again.

In a week school starts again.

And it's a really exciting time.

54,000 students heading to a couple thousand classrooms in over 100 schools.

But honestly I'm a little scared too.

Because we have several schools including two high schools Garfield and Ballard that are stretched to the breaking point.

and it's been getting worse every year and we have been not seeing the change.

And we don't know what's actually going to, who is going to show up to those schools.

We don't know how many students there are going to be because things change over the summer.

We do our best with projections but those last couple of percent that we miss on the projections can be what tips over the school and breaks it.

Now here's what you can do, if you don't take action tonight Tomorrow, the only tool remaining for the district to manage those issues on start day of school will dissolve.

When the waitlist dissolve.

If you keep the waitlist open until September 15 or September 30, then you have a chance to deal with the unexpected.

If you don't, you don't.

Nothing is saying if you keep the waitlists open that you have to move them.

But if you don't have them open, you can't.

So why would you give up the opportunity to fix a problem instead of just letting it go and hoping for the best?

Thank you.

Also for the Fort Lawton if there is a concern about being able to open a school in three years, there are all kinds of programs within the school district that are in the 100 to 200 student range that could be located in the existing buildings on a temporary basis.

Thank you.

Good evening my name is Ethan Rogers I have a son Casey who is number six at the moment on the Ingram HCC waitlist and he has also spoken to you before.

Please hold the waitlist open until September 15 or as long as is necessary for enrollment planning to one complete the waitlist swaps as directed by the board's July 5 motion and two to allow enrollment planning to further move waitlist based on no-shows at the start of the school year.

This includes that night Ingram ninth grade waitlist.

On July 4 the motion that this board passed stated in the part pertinent to these remarks that quote high schools with seat and space capacity be allowed to move their waitlist through waitlist trades that do not impact total enrollment.

I don't pretend to speak for the board but in that there is nothing about the program in the way it was worded.

Enrollment planning has interpreted it that it had to be program to program.

This entirely cut out the HCC program at Ingram from these waitlist swaps.

Mr. Associate Superintendent Herndon was very kind to give me a few moments before the meeting he did indicate that tomorrow that all the Gen Ed to Gen Ed swaps had been completed, and that tomorrow they would have time in the morning to start looking to see where they in fact could do HCC to Gen Ed swaps.

By my calculations, there's at least a dozen, maybe more of these potential swaps that could happen.

That is 24 families that could be further satisfied if they are given the time to make these swaps.

Also the HCC has been cut out from this.

If five HCC students don't show up at Ingraham and haven't given word, that is five more students who could be taken off that HCC waitlist and moved into the HCC program that they want to get at.

It is the one waitlist that has been up until very recently has not had any chance to move at all.

There again, and the final point is there has never been an Ingram HCC waitlist before.

They were always able to accommodate it.

We need to accommodate it just a little bit longer to do as much as we can in order to give the families both some JEDD and some HCC as much satisfaction as we possibly can.

Thank you.

Next up for public testimony we have Alex Cooper followed by Sarah Coulter and Melissa Westbrook.

Hello I'm Alex Cooper and I have concerns that school capacity will not keep pace with Seattle's rapid growth.

I have concerns that the school district is not taking advantage of a once in a lifetime opportunity to obtain the Fort Lawton land currently available in Discovery Park.

The city of Seattle will grow by 120,000 people in the next 20 years.

Seattle Public Schools projects a five-year student growth of 3600 students by 2020. It's only three years away.

There is no doubt that student numbers will continue to grow past 2020. Concerned citizens of Seattle have gone a great length to provide SPS with this Fort Lauderdale land opportunity.

This land opportunity is surrounded by trees and views of the sound that represent everything that is Seattle and the Pacific Northwest.

If you've not seen the land yourself I encourage you to do so.

Dr. Nyland recently turned down this piece of land citing concerns about a lack of immediate need and immediate funding.

If the superintendent and board are looking for a no answer on this land they will easily find it.

If you want a yes answer for this land I have no doubt that a motivated superintendent and school board could make this happen.

I ask the Seattle school board members and Dr. Nyland to reevaluate SPS's ability to obtain this free land opportunity.

I encourage you to communicate further with the Department of Education to create ways this land transfer could work.

I ask you to again review the rules pertaining to such a land transfer.

My understanding is that if SPS does not build a school in the required three-year timeline there may be a penalty.

But perhaps that penalty on a free piece of land would be less the amount of money needed to purchase a new piece of land in the Seattle area where no land exists.

I encourage you to view this piece of land as an opportunity for all students in the district.

This opportunity is not just a school for Magnolia.

Extra land and extra schools no matter where they are built means a reduction in school crowding throughout the district.

I appreciate your time.

Hi my name is Sarah Coulter I have a second grader at Lawton Elementary and a preschooler as well.

I truly believe that all students should have access to a strong public school system.

In my own life it opened doors, provided stability and leveled the playfield.

I'm here today out of concern regarding the Fort Lawton site.

There seems to be a very strong disconnect between the district's plans and the feedback from families who live here.

We have seen very strong community support for a school to be included as an option for the Fort Lawton site.

This is highlighted by three data points.

Number one, the city just released their scoping report for this project.

It lists 189 supporters for their affordable housing and park plan.

However, it lists 293 supporters for a school.

A school was not even listed as an option on their proposal yet it had 55% more supporters than they planned they presented.

Number two, we quickly gathered over 1200 signatures on a change.org petition.

The comments provide rich insight into the potential school uses for this land.

Number three, we did a survey with almost 400 users and when asked where they prefer a high school for Magnolia and Queen Anne students, 75% said Fort Lawton, only 20% said Seattle Center, and 5% said other.

Again, the community support for a school on this site is huge.

Please continue to push to get this land for free.

Thank you.

Good evening.

The 13th year mentioned by the superintendent just so you know mayoral candidate Jenny Durkan wants to expand on this idea but wants to get some of the money for the families in education levy which would be problematic for the programs in Seattle schools funded by those dollars.

As well to consider that levy comes up for renewal about 2019 and may include in that round charter schools.

Just a heads up.

I'm quite sad the district is not going to do everything it can to acquire free land again.

It's odd because the superintendent said in his letter to the city it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Actually it's a twice-in-a-lifetime because we let the Federal Reserve building get away from us.

I certainly know there are barriers but I perceive they could be worked out especially with help from corporate citizens.

I'm not sure how we don't meet the definition but it would be nice to see that in writing.

What I think is happening is that district staff don't want a single thing to get in the way of their outsized dream of a high school at Memorial Stadium.

And yet you are opening one high school in several, Rainier Beach, West Seattle, Cleveland are not full.

Also how come if we give the city free space in Seattle schools for preschool that we don't get free space for center school?

It would seem like a fair swap to be able to have that kind of thing.

I think the solar project that you are voting on tonight is misguided with so much maintenance needed throughout the district.

And the money is coming from BEX 2 and 3. Why are there so many extra dollars floating around when the needs are great?

It speaks to Director Pinkham's point about other schools needing help.

It speaks to Director Harris's point about playgrounds at Title I schools.

So that's not so good.

As for the South Shore thing I am very glad that you've changed that to an intro because we're not in an emergency so we don't need an intro and action.

And I'm very glad that you changed the policy there around principles.

It must remain with the district it must remain with the superintendent.

And I just want to say not so happy on the new website.

I tried to just look up something about executive directors and I can't even pull up a page.

So next time.

Thank you.

This concludes the sign up list for public testimony this evening.

Thank you everybody for coming to speak tonight.

I would now like to extend the opportunity to any directors who would like to respond to any of the comments they heard tonight.

Director Burke.

I want to start with an oversight from round one which is as we were identifying and acknowledging new principals I want to identify and acknowledge new central staff as well.

You know where I'm going Caleb Perkins director of college and career readiness I just want to welcome you.

Caleb is taking over from Dan Gallagher and I'm excited for the vision that he brings and the work that he's going to be doing.

Not to say that there's a lot of it but there's a lot of it.

So the two hot topics that I want to touch on around wait lists and the capacity planning Fort Lawton downtown school.

I appreciate Director Harris's strong perspective and enthusiasm around the Fort Lawton site because I know that It wasn't immediately obvious that this was something that Seattle could capture, could be an opportunity.

And as the public has daylighted more things, and staff has tried to vet them, the bar for acquiring that land continues to be higher.

But I concur with Director Harris that maybe we haven't gotten to the point where we should write it off.

that you know some of the political conversations that can be had around truly understanding what are the you know are we looking at some type of.

administrative boilerplate barrier that is being put in place by federal organizations that truly don't understand the situation of the dynamics in Seattle?

Or is this a reality?

So I'm interested to explore that further as a board and as a leadership body.

With the recognition that if we don't get it this time, we want to be really explicit about building this type of opportunity into our long-term strategic planning.

So that we are more proactive on future opportunities, whether it's a downtown school, whether it's a reservoir site, whether it's any other type of properties that could come up in the future.

The waitlists I would actually like to ask directly to associate superintendent Herndon regarding the moving of waitlists if the topics that were shared by the by public are appropriate that you will be looking at sort of cross-program waitlist moves prior to dissolving the waitlist.

If that is something that is being considered.

Herndon.

Yes we will be looking at that tomorrow morning.

Wonderful thank you.

And would it be possible for you to quickly comment on if there's a value or an advantage to enrollment planning on having the waitlist as a resource for start of school shortages that could you know if a building was short on enrollment to be able to have a pool of people to potentially draw from to help populate that school so they didn't lose staff?

Well, I think the challenge and the reason why we moved it is you're moving students from one building to another.

So if you do that, that means another building will be losing students and could possibly be losing staff.

So this was an attempt to stop that staff kind of merry-go-round of reassignment and who's qualifying for how much staff.

I appreciate the comment on that because I know that is something that had been discussed with the board as part of this previous student assignment transition plan work to identify the dates for that.

That we truly do want to minimize disruption in our schools.

Thank you.

I just want to say thank you for the folks that have done some really impressive heavy lifting.

Thanks for showing up to get counted.

I certainly hope that we can make this work but if it doesn't I hope you feel heard and I hope you feel more respected.

Thank you.

Director Geary.

I'm going to share this perspective on the Lawton issue just because my district is the district that has Sandpoint.

And the whole project gives me so much concern because we have a housing project in one of our parks that is being severely underserved by the city.

They have moved in and are going to continue to move in families that are not supported by community-based organizations.

Because there aren't a lot of community-based organizations in lower Northeast Seattle.

And they are not going to get the numbers they need in order to relocate there.

So we have families that are at least living on a bus route that can take them up to Northgate and can take them down to the link.

And they have some access to move around.

But they don't even have a grocery store that they can get to.

And so the city has a community center that they're not investing in.

It is leased out to two private schools that use the majority of the space.

It's inadequately staffed to meet the student that the population that lives there.

And they won't commit to making it work.

And we've seen several tragedies in that park now this summer.

So the whole project just makes me so incredibly nervous.

And it's not supported properly.

And I would say as a community make sure that they've done it right in one place before they move on and do it in another place.

Because what happens is you put a school in there and as the social safety net is not built in that case, or dismantled, it falls on the school.

But our schools are not funded to be the complete social safety net for such a situation.

And so then you have a school that has a lot of problems in it.

That the people in the community who live there who have money can choose to go elsewhere.

And then when the enrollment drops, as it has at Sandpoint elementary, you don't have the extra resources to build up the supports, to meet the needs of the kids who have been left stranded there because the social safety net isn't in place.

So I appreciate what you're saying, but the whole thing just makes me so incredibly nervous.

So those are my thoughts just so I make them transparent to everybody because it's hard for me to get beyond that in the conversation as much as I understand and hear the other aspects that you're bringing in.

I think the conversation needs to slow down and we need to make sure that free land isn't the only thing that's on the table.

It's what does this whole thing mean and do we have government agencies that are really committing to support what they're building.

Director Pinkham.

Thank you to all the public testimony speakers tonight.

I appreciate you coming here as we are starting up a new year and though it was a short list I think we had some valuable information from you and yes I do look to you to appreciate the research that you've done and what you bring forward that we can then share with the staff here and see what can be done.

I have to admit that hopefully we won't take no for an answer.

I never did that when I was a child.

A kid with my parents would tell me no, I'd go right back and try again.

Or get a no from the dad, go ask the mom kind of a thing.

I would like to see us still pursuing, I definitely acknowledge what Director Geary is saying, let's look at lessons learned from what we had with San Juan.

What is going right, what is not going right there?

And how we can proceed from there.

Again let's take things as learning opportunities and make sure we are always moving forward.

So is it going to be different with a high school versus an elementary school?

What are those impacts there that we have to take into consideration?

For the waitlist, another kind of question, so if we do still have after neither no shows or stuff that go on, if a school isn't impacted by moving one student from one school to another school, is that still a possibility?

So if I can move two students from this school to Ingram and it won't impact the school that they are moving from is that still something we can do?

Now once the waitlist are dissolved, SPS enrolled students don't have the opportunity to move between schools unless they were to move their physical address.

And then that's how they would move.

But we don't move students once they've started and are enrolled in that situation.

Obvious exceptions would be if a student had an IEP and they had an assignment to another school, obviously that would happen.

If a student was in a homeless situation, sometimes that would happen where that changes as well.

Okay so I guess it's an idea where it would look like we're having a practice where we see okay we won't move schools if it impacts another school negatively.

But I think some of our community members hey if we're not going to impact that school negatively can I still possibly get my a child into a school that is going to serve them or meet their needs a bit better than the current one that I'm assigned to.

So if the wait lists are dissolved it seems like no we wouldn't be able to do that.

So I'd be wondering if there is just something we can look at to maybe address such issues for this year or maybe next year because it seems like if we have the space it's not going to impact someone how can we allow students to move to a school that is their first choice?

Definitely we can look for that in the student assignment plan.

Director Patu and Director Harris.

I wanted to also to say that congratulations to Hawthorne elementary school for receiving the John Hopkins award.

And I also want to thank Director Geary for explaining to the public about the situation with the Lawton property.

I think that it's always great to get a free space or free property but you have to really have to calculate everything that has to be on it.

If you want a school to be successful we have to really look at what's on it and how do we actually able to provide opportunities if we decide to put a school there and it takes a lot more than just bringing the building and putting it up so we have to look at all the ifs and the what's to make sure that if we decide to put a school there that it would be very successful.

and that is cost-effective.

So I think that if we are looking at that it's a good way to actually do our homework and be able to look at what is the pluses and the minus and hopefully that we can be able to move it forward if it's something that's going to really be able to be a plus for the Seattle Public Schools and the students that we serve.

And also I wanted to to say that it's always an opportunity when we are looking at pulling up a new school.

But also it's a minus when we don't have all the resources and information in order for us to be able to really look at the site and make sure that it is the right site.

And I like the fact that you know the teacher talked about there is no housing in that area And hopefully that it will be a community that will be built up in the future and hopefully that we can be able to look at a school in the near future.

But right now I think that it's something that we actually can look at it and be able to start looking at what are some of the ways that we can be able to look at that as a site for a future site for a school for Seattle Public Schools.

I wanted to also to say that my next community meetings will be, since this month is over, will be next community meeting will be on the 30th of September and it's at Rock and Tour and it usually starts at 9 o'clock to 11 o'clock in the morning.

Director Harris.

I had a question for Associate Superintendent Herndon if I could please.

What I heard from director Pinkham was if we were to put in some kind of a filter that a waitlist move would not negatively impact another school.

Could we keep the waitlist open for an additional amount of time?

Do you have a sense of A how difficult that would be and B how many students might be impacted?

Best I don't know that offhand but I can certainly take a look at that.

It's going to depend on a certain amount of schools.

So I don't have a sense of that right now.

I'd have to take a look at that later.

But obviously assistant superintendent Berge has some thoughts about that as well.

Berge And I absolutely expected that welcome.

Please.

JoLynn Berge Hello JoLynn Berge assistant superintendent for business and finance.

I can appreciate all the concerns.

What I can say is that my staff they do not have the capacity to do what you're asking in that time frame.

We are the ones who will have to run all the numbers and we cannot do it.

We have started school where we will have to be doing the other enrollment projections and coming on top of that we will simply not be able to manage it.

We are working very hard to make sure that our fall staffing adjustments that have to happen happen more quickly.

Because we've had a lot of families who have been very upset with us making staffing changes too late in the year.

And so that impacts a great number of our families and we are trying to address that issue.

We have a plan this year to do that.

We are trying to get that done by the third week of September which is earlier than we have in recent history.

And so that's what we are up against.

Director Harris Thank you for the input.

Director Blanford.

As we started to discuss this it brought back to my memory long conversations that we had as a board and staff about changing the waitlist and getting to the place that we are now.

And from our educators and from administration we heard a really strong argument to say that stability of schools is really important.

and that is why we landed on the date.

There was rich discussion about when the date should actually be but there was a sense I remember I think amongst the board that we were prioritizing stability in schools and it seems like there is a revisiting of that and I hope that we will take into consideration the impact, the negative impact that this could potentially have in our schools.

When we are trying to start school, we are trying to get to a pretty consistent number of students that we expect and can serve and then we have staffing considerations that go along with that.

And so all of this to say that I'm making a pretty strong argument I believe that we should look at any potential changes that we could make that would not have a negative impact on the stability of schools but to the extent possible maintain that stability of schools as a principle that we hold true to.

Okay I'm going to leap in and I'm also going to conclude the discussion.

First of all thank you everybody who came out especially when it's still sort of summer vacation for some people.

It's always great to hear from the public on these different issues.

Thank you to all my colleagues for your thoughtful insights.

I'll start off with the waitlist and I remember what Director Blanford was saying and I think the conversation about waitlist started a couple years ago when we first talked about moving it to earlier so planning could be done earlier so things could be less disruptive.

I'm not sure if everybody here was present for that conversation.

And what I feel is this instinct to try and have the waitlist open as long as we can so on the possibility that we might be able to not only meet the needs of families but also use it as a tool to help with capacity challenges we have and perhaps even avoid mitigation funds.

Having to mitigate.

But it sounds like it's not that easy and that there is a sort of tug of war that happens when you move the waitlist.

You've got to look at what you leave behind.

So I'm glad we had this conversation.

I also believe that if the waitlist can be used as a tool to help, then I'm all for it.

But if we're pushing things so far into the beginning of the school year that it's making things disruptive in lots of different ways, I'm concerned about that.

So and as far as there was a comment made about HCC not being part of the waitlist calculations I would like to ask staff to speak to that at some point because I didn't know that that was the case.

I thought that they that was part of I thought everything was part of the whole waitlist conversation.

But I understand that associate superintendent Herndon is looking into that tomorrow and so perhaps we can get an update after all of that is taken care of.

I'm concerned when we have programs where we say students who qualify for programs are assured that they will get placement, this is their needs after all, it's part of basic education and then we somehow are not able to accommodate them.

And the same goes for all of our special ed students.

Regarding Fort Lawton, what I would like at this point, and I have asked Superintendent Nyland if this could be possible, is to have some just basic information outlining the pros and cons of the Fort Lawton idea and the pros and cons of the Memorial Stadium idea.

Just so we have a sense of what we are looking at.

Because I think there has been a lot of discussion going on, I don't know that everyone has been a part of the discussion and it would be really helpful for the board and probably for the public to have a really clear grasp of what it is we are looking at.

As somebody who lives in the Queen Anne Magnolia neighborhood I have to say I'm feeling very very anxious about capacity issues on those two hills.

I've lived there now for about 12 years and it's gotten to the point that when I go to the community pool I don't recognize anybody.

There's lots of new families coming in with lots of kids and I'm just wondering where are they all going to go?

And even with opening Magnolia Elementary I think that's going to be full almost immediately.

I think the expansion to Queen Anne Elementary is also going to be filled and I do see a real need for capacity in those two neighborhoods.

And if Expedia does go ahead and move into its new campus in 2019 I think Magnolia is going to be an obvious place for a lot of Expedia families.

So, you know, we've been caught off guard before as a district in some of our planning and we have not recovered from having sold off Queen Anne High School.

And so I am very interested in knowing what the pros and cons are with Fort Lawton.

Have we turned over every stone?

Is there anybody we could tap as an ally who could help us?

you know possibly secure it if not immediately you know for some future use.

I would be interested in knowing more about that and if there is a definitive no to this I would like to see that very clearly but right now I am not totally clear on all of the rationales And then as far as Memorial Stadium I know that is not a new conversation and I would love to have more information about what exactly we are looking at in terms of a project, what is feasible, what the costs are, and the timeline.

And then undergirding all of this I think it would be helpful to have some demographic data that shows us what the trends are in our district, in our city, by region, and where the needs are going to be for which kinds of schools.

And that will help us further understand what kind of needs we are chasing or predicting.

On the topic of CSIPs, I think some people brought that up, those are school improvement plans, continuous improvement plans for our schools.

I just want to say that I do believe they have improved.

In the last couple of years I think we have made a point of talking about them and shining some light on them and then telling our principals what we hope to be in them and asking them what help they might need with them and asking our ed directors to step up and help them.

So we are not at a point of perfection but they are works in progress.

Let's see.

I want to give a shout out to all our new principals it was really energizing and positive to meet all the new people who will be taking control of a lot of our schools and for me there's some familiar faces including one principal who was who taught one of my sons in first grade.

So it's so wonderful to see people committed to their community and rise up and stay committed to the community in a leadership position.

I also want to send out my congratulations and my empathy to all the families who may have been sending their kids off to college in the last few weeks.

It's a challenging time and it's a heart-wrenching time to come home afterwards and realize that you're not going to see that kid for six weeks or eight weeks.

So you certainly got my empathy on that.

Good luck to all our new schools that are opening I'm very excited about all of them.

Please let us know all of you in these new school communities if you need anything if there's any resources that are missing anything you need please let the board know and we will do our best to make sure that you have everything to start off well.

I have a community meeting scheduled for Saturday September 16 from 11 to 1 in the Magnolia library as always everybody is welcome to attend.

And a couple of other points I had the honor of being able to briefly speak at the summer leadership Institute and join all so many people who were there.

It was an inspiring, informative event and I want to thank everybody who puts it together and I hope it will be the prelude to a really strong year for everyone.

I also reached out to principals and said please let the board know what your needs are.

Sometimes I feel like there is a lack of communication between the board and our schools and I would like to extend an open invitation for better communication.

And then Director Geary I think brought up a really good point about the student assignment plan.

Now is the perfect time for anybody to give us their feedback on the student assignment plan.

Any concerns you have, any oversights, anything you want us to take a look at so that we are not looking at the last minute.

And that way we can weave it into the plan rather than have to do lots of amendments at the last minute which are never ideal but it is a tool that we do have.

And I think I think I've exhausted my little cheat sheet here.

All right so I want to wish everybody a fantastic new year and I'm now going to call for a 10 minute recess for the board and then when we return we have a relatively short agenda tonight and then we will have an executive session afterwards.

Thank you.

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