After 14 years, B.F. Day Elementary Principal Susan McCloskey will retire from her post at the end of the school year, though she hints that she may come back as a substitute for Special Ed. from time to time.
The principal position was posted to the public and the District is currently reviewing resumes. At the end of March, the B.F. Day PTSA will assist Seattle Schools’ NW Region Director Marni Campbell with narrowing down candidates.
We’ll keep you posted once the new principal has been named.
Best principal EVER. She will be missed.
I´ve only heard great things. Sounds like a real loss for SPS. Wishing her well and may BF Day find the second bess principal ever to replace her.
Knows the names of all the kids and what bus they ride. Spends time in every classroom every week. Understands the students’ motivations, friendships, and strengths. Has the teachers’ backs. Works with parents to help students get what they need. And does it all without fuss or drama.
Her replacement will have big sneakers to fill.
Note that with the school board’s recent decisions, for all intents and purposes B.F. Day is the Wallingford neighborhood school, not JSIS.
Best wishes to Ms. McCloskey.
Huber
If Ms. McCloskey is such a great principal, can someone please explain why BF Day is such a poorly performing school? Our family is affected by the recent border changes. I’m curious about the cause of BF Days problems and am hopeful that a change in leadership will improve the school.
Dollyton — Test scores correlate extremely well with measures of other challenges facing kids, like the fraction of kids qualifying for free and reduced-price lunch. In the years of school choice, BF Day had one or more busloads of students coming from the south end of the city, and between that and the higher fraction of rental properties close to the school, BF Day has traditionally been more economically diverse than the typical NE cluster schools. For BF Day, the fraction of kids qualifying for free or reduced price lunches is 43%, whereas for John Stanford, West Woodland, and Greenlake its 22%, 9%, and 23%. How could one not expect a factor of 2-4 increase in the poverty rate not to affect the level of preparation and home support that even the best loved children received? There just isn’t enough of a social safety net in place to make up for the impacts of economic instability. Honestly, your hope for a “change in leadership [to] improve the school” is fairly misguided. I’m willing to bet that the school’s test scores are going to go up on the simple fact that the new assignment plan is changing the school’s demographics to include more kids from economically advantaged homes.
For our family, the economic diversity is a huge plus — our kids have been friends with lots of terrific children from a wide variety of backgrounds and family situations that don’t perfectly mirror our own. Our kids have been challenged appropriately, and have been incredibly well supported emotionally and academically when they’ve had troubles. There is -nothing- that a “change in leadership” could possibly have done to improve our kids education so far. Maybe I’m mispeaking, and you currently have children at the school that you feel have been poorly served, in which case I’m sorry for getting a bit ranty. As a BF Day parent, I’m really hoping that new families will come into the school with a positive, open attitude, as opposed to feeling like they’re getting some sort of raw deal. The school has extremely high levels of staff and parent satisfaction for a reason.
jd said it very well. Anyone can look up that type of stastics from the school site on the district site by clicking on data and selecting the year.
Thanks for your response, jd – I didn’t even find it too ranty 🙂 My child won’t start elementary school for two more years, so I’m just starting to learn about the school. I really appreciate your perspective and am looking forward to being an active, involved parent in the BF Day community.
I don’t pretend to be well-informed on the subject, though I have reviewed the data from district site. The problem with the data is that it’s very raw and doesn’t give any context or explanation for the lower scores (like that the lower scores are the results of busing, lower income students, etc). I wish the school was able to do a better job of giving the full picture. For me to just infer that the lower socio-economic population correlates to lower scores doesn’t paint a full picture. Like, how does this affect the classroom environment and learning experience of the rest of the children? I really appreciate the perspective of current parents (like jd) and must say that every BF Day parent I have spoken with is happy with the school. I plan to arrange for a tour of the school and perhaps they’ll be able to paint a fuller picture. I do wish BF Day would do more to promote their academic successes and focus less on being the “family school.” I’m just…nervous.
I attended the BF Day open house this year and was a little bothered by how disorganized the school appeared to be. I don’t have any frame of reference other than my own experience in school, but the classrooms seemed kind of messy and at least one had junky plastic toys in it. Maybe all schools are like that these days? I left feeling like it wasn’t a very nice environment for learning and wondering why the leadership (principal?) of the school allowed the classrooms to be in such a state.
On a slightly different tangent (since jd and others seem to be quite knowledgeable about BF Day): I was told that BF Day had the opportunity to become a language immersion school and opted not to because they didn’t think they’d be able to raise the funds to support the program. Since language immersion seems to be such a huge draw for so many parents and since the demographics for the school should begin to somewhat mirror those of Stanford and McDonald, I wonder if that’s something current parents are buzzing about at all…?
I would not at all support having a third language immersion program in a contiguous area. Language immersion is not something that automatically works for all kids, and in recognition of that, parents in the JSIS area who do -not- want language immersion have the right to request BF Day (as I understand it). With a third adjacent program, you’ve got a huge geographic area where kids who would not be well served by language immersion would have to be displaced from. (And personally, I think that language immersion should be an “option school” deal, rather than a neighborhood assigned school, so that everyone has an equal shot at access, if they think it’s the right fit for their kid — certainly the shifts in the BF Day / JSIS boundary would be much less fraught if people didn’t feel like they were being shifted from “have” to “have not”.)
And with regards to the “Family School” thing, I was probably where you were back when my oldest was in preschool, and we were looking at schools. I ranked BF Day low on my list, and frankly, in retrospect, I didn’t know what the heck I was doing. Subsequent years of experience have shown me that the emphasis on “family” has been far more important to my kids’ academic success than any “Rah! Rah! Testscores!” horn-tooting from on high. My kids are complex, in very different ways, and having an environment where they were -known-, loved, and understood made all the difference in the world to making sure they wanted to be in school, and that the staff could identify what they needed. My youngest has a lot of challenges, and will always be bringing your future school’s test scores down (no matter who is principal), but at BF Day s/he’s got a network of caring people working incredibly hard to help him/her succeed. Same thing for his/her friends in Spectrum.
It’s normal to be nervous sending your first kid off, and to read into every little detail with some degree of trepidation, and to stress about the things that deviate from how you would like them to be in a perfect world. But, in general, I’ve found the SPS elementary teachers to be dedicated educators who have proved worthy of my trust. I’m not saying that it’s impossible that some situations wouldn’t be right for any particular kid, but that in general, unless your child (or an individual teacher) is at the extremes in some way, s/he will probably have a satisfying first 6 years of school. A couple of years from now, I think you’ll probably be amused at your initial concern that the existence of junky plastic toys would potentially diminish your child’s chance at academic success….
Well said jd. Dollyton, the scores are hard to decipher, but if you look towards the bottom, you’ll see a carveout for “Reduced /Free Lunch” and to get that designation, you must be living at or below poverty level and that 43% of the students is pretty handily accounts for much of the gap between JSIS. (e.g. if you pull out the 42% of RFL kids who got a 46% in reading proficiency, the remaining 58% not living in or near poverty averaged 76% proficiency.)
That accounts for much of the low scores and the NSAP will eventually cause the RFL% to come down as the grandfathered RFL kids graduate.
The other side of this problem was “bright flight” (like that? I just made that up…) where parents of gifted kids felt they had to leave BF Day to challenge their kids. (partly due to a lack of gifted programs and in part due to the common misperception of the scores). Now BF Day has Spectrum so those bright kids don’t have to leave, and our distribution starts to look more like JSIS.
Our girs both went to BF Day in recent years and we absolutely loved it. The diversity there is much better than in most north-end schools, which we really values as a part of our family’s learning experience. Such a sweet, community oriented school! Mrs. Closkey really is the best principal EVER. I hope their search is super successful for the next generation. 🙂
Chris, I am totally using “bright flight.” Love it.
I would check classrooms, curriculum, MAP scores as well as state scores, interview teachers and still want my kids to walk to a scheeol. Appealing is one step.
I would check classrooms, curriculum, MAP scores as well as state scores, interview teachers and still want my kids to walk to a school. Appealing is one step.
From Wallingford Ave (the center of Wallingford, no?) BF Day is equidistant to JSIS at .6 miles in either direction. We’ve walked it for years. You just go over the 41st overpass and you are there.
My daughter was at BF Day for kindergarten and walked there (with our fabulous neighbor) almost every day. Very walkable.
Also, she’s definitely one of the best principals in the district. A real gem and a real loss to SPS. Hey, maybe she’ll go into principal training!
eeyiiee — You can certainly check all that, but the reality is that your address will determine what school your child goes to. The only other possibility is trying to get into an option school (in which case, you won’t be walking), or, if you can prove that your child needs services not provided by the school (APP, certain kinds of special ed support).
i miss HERRRR its been years, she had a pic of me and my brother in her office