The Seattle School Board’s 9/1/2010 Meeting

Charlie Mas:

Lots of fun, interesting stuff on the agenda for the September 1 Board meeting.
It begins with a work session on the Strategic Infrastructure and Maintenance Initiative. Give it a big fancy name like that and it creates the illusion that something’s happening. Nothing is happening. Just as they do with students working below grade level, the District counts and tracks backlogged maintenance, but they don’t actually do much about it. They will, however, produce a glorious powerpoint and lots of matrices and spreadsheets about the problem with no solution in sight.
The Legislative meeting opens with Public Testimony. It will probably be dominated, again, with people talking about the teachers’ contract negotiation. Of course, since that contract isn’t on the agenda, everyone who wants to talk about it can get bumped by people who want to talk about agenda items. If you can put together a group of 20 people who will sign up to speak to agenda items then you can freeze out all of the contract testimony.