If you’ve got kids entering Kindergarten next fall (yes, we early birds really do have to start thinking about enrollment now, can you believe it?) then you might be interested in attending the upcoming meetings regarding the second year of Seattle Public Schools’ New Student Assignment Plan. A meeting for our attendance area (this includes John Stanford, Hamilton, McDonald School, BF Day and Roosevelt High School) will be held on Monday, November 22 at Ingraham High School (1819 N 135 St.), from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m. There are also several informal “drop-in” meetings taking place at the John Stanford Center (2445 3rd Avenue South) this Saturday, November 6 (from 10:00 a.m. to noon); on Thursday, November 18 (from 1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.); and another one scheduled for Tuesday, December 14 (from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.) You can visit the SPS website for all the details, but here are some highlights:
Work has begun to create the Transition Plan for 2011-12, which will set out rules for the continued phasing-in of the New Student Assignment Plan. Seattle Public Schools is seeking input from families, staff and community members to help shape the Transition Plan. At a series of formal meetings and informal drop-in sessions, staff will share data and information about enrollment trends, options to balance enrollment with capacity and other information related to capacity management.
Since the initial plan was approved last January, both the 2010-2011 and the 2011-2012 school years have their own “transition plans”, kind of serving as a hybrid between the old boundary lines and the New Student Assignment Plan. For example, younger siblings entering Kindergarten this fall were “grandfathered” into their older sibling’s school, even if the school wasn’t in the family’s attendance area. Will that be a possibility for next Fall? We won’t know until the School Board votes on the second year transition plan in January–and even before that happens, SPS has to determine what’s feasible. According to their site, “Planning for the second year of the new student assignment plan will be integrated with development of a long- term Capacity Management Plan. Board policy requires an annual review of enrollment trends, capacity needs and facilities needs.”
Wow. Is your head spinning yet? Mine sure is. I’d say learning how to play Whackbat sounds a lot easier.
You mentioned that the younger siblings were “grandfathered” in this year. Unless I am mistaken, they were not. It was not until the end of September, that siblings were offered a space, and ONLY if space allowed.
You’re right in that they could only attend their sibling’s school if there was space available. The transition plan for 2010-2011 which was approved on January 20 of this year has the “grandfather” language:
The goals of this Transition Plan for assignment of incoming kindergarten siblings are to:
• Accommodate non-attendance area kindergarten students in older siblings’ schools to the greatest reasonable extent. (Appendix A identifies specific strategies to address this issue.)
• Assure families that elementary school siblings will not be required to attend different schools, through “safety net” transition rules. The “safety net” transition rules provide that:
– If the incoming K student applies just for the older sibling’s school during Open Enrollment and is assigned to the new attendance area school instead, the older sibling will be assigned to the attendance area school upon request (assuming services needed are available at that school).
– If the older student is attending a school outside of the attendance area to access special education services not available at the attendance area school, the “safety net” of assigning the older sibling to the attendance area school is not possible. If the incoming K student applies just for the older sibling’s school, and If the services the older student needs are not available at the attendance area school, the incoming K student will be assigned to the older sibling’s school upon request.
HOT BOX!
Why is the meeting for our attendance area all the way up at Ingraham?
PLEASE tell me this does not include the Ballard High School area. There will be no space to talk about anything else… There should be a separate meeting just for people who want to talk about that.
Initially, the meeting was scheduled to take place at Ballard High on Nov. 4., but they moved it to Ingraham. Ballard H.S. is among the several schools represented at this meeting. Here’s the full list:
Ballard, Ingraham, The Center School, Evening School, Hamilton Int’l, Whitman, Broadview-Thomson (K-8), Salmon Bay (K-8), Adams, BF Day, Bagley, Greenwood, John Stanford Int’l, Loyal Heights, McDonald, North Beach, Northgate, West Woodland, Whittier
I’m guessing going to the more informal “drop-in” meetings might be the way to go as there are more of them and might not be as crowded as the formal meeting.
You also have the option of sending your kid to a terrific public alternative school that serves our neighborhood- Salmon Bay in Ballard:
http://www.salmonbayschool.org/
It is a K-8 school and though it may be hard to figure out on the District’s web page, it is a choice in addition to your assigned neighborhood school.
See here for some information:
http://www.seattleschools.org/area/newassign/faq_optional.html
Good luck with this process!
If you had a younger sibling in SPS this year (outside of the reference area), I’m pretty sure that you would not consider them “grandfathered” in. Try talking to the parents of the siblings that were waitlisted for months and the stress that they went through all summer and even into September. I still disagree with your pronouncement that the siblings were grandfathered in (regardless of the “language”). Sorry.