Faculty board enterprise usually doesn’t dominate the information cycle. Elections generate notoriously low turnouts. And even crucial schooling information tends to draw solely a subset of readers, devoted although they’re.
However final week, with the abrupt resignation of two administrators on the Seattle Faculty Board over questions on their compliance with residency guidelines, all types of pundits needed to leap into the fray, principally to carp about how chronically dysfunctional the college board appears to be.
The remaining 5 board members now have 90 days to assessment purposes and appoint somebody to characterize District 2 (Greenwood, Ballard, Magnolia) and another person for District 4 (Downtown, Queen Anne, Belltown and Fremont), since these are the quadrants with sudden vacancies.
Board President Liza Rankin guarantees extra particulars on the district’s common Wednesday assembly. However to this point, communication across the course of has been a tangle, and plenty of questions stay, notably across the risk that each seats ought to have been up for election by voters final fall. Now, nevertheless, it seems that the present board majority will determine who fills them.
Fortunately, this metropolis has a considerate new outlet for commentary and dialogue about its ever-confounding faculty district, the Seattle Corridor Cross podcast.
A current episode dissected the resignation debacle, and ended with a collection of views, most notably that of former board director Kay Smith-Blum, who stated having the present majority select its new members — after abdicating oversight of the finances amid spiraling pupil efficiency — was a situation that “must be of grave concern to all Seattle residents.”
Different episodes coated the widespread disruption final fall when academics and elementary college students in additional than 40 faculties have been shuffled into totally different school rooms a month after the yr had begun; and the breaking information — leaked to the podcast — that Seattle, regardless of rumors on the contrary, wouldn’t shut faculties because of sagging enrollment. (At the least, not this yr.)
On the Corridor Cross podcast, listeners get a deep dive into matters of curiosity to hosts Christie Robertson and Jane Tunks Demel, each of whom have kids in Seattle Public Faculties. Robertson, who ran unsuccessfully for the college board final yr, is a particular schooling advocate with a Ph.D. in neurobiology and habits. She probes points logically, fastidiously, like a scientist.
Tunks Demel, who moved north from the Bay Space together with her household in the beginning of the pandemic, is a former journalist with a style for digging. And one of many podcast’s standout qualities is its documentation, together with interview transcripts. “Our largest purpose is to tell and to make it attainable to affix the dialog,” Tunks Demel stated. “There’s just about zero entry factors for group members to have their voices heard in Seattle Public Faculties.”
The 2 supply sober evaluation, sans slant. For district information with extra angle — and a few conspiracy-minded commenters — there’s the Seattle Faculties Group Discussion board, a long-running weblog written by former SPS dad or mum Melissa Westbrook, who devotes appreciable vitality to district goings-on although she not lives full-time in Washington.
Between the podcast, the weblog and legacy media like public radio and this newspaper, Seattleites have an unusually wealthy ecosystem of schooling protection.
Goodness is aware of, Seattle Public Faculties wants as many eyes on it as attainable.