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School board business typically does not dominate the news cycle. Elections generate notoriously low turnouts. And even the most important education news tends to attract only a subset of readers, dedicated though they are.
But last week, with the abrupt resignation of two directors on the Seattle School Board over questions about their compliance with residency rules, all kinds of pundits wanted to jump into the fray, mostly to carp about how chronically dysfunctional the school board seems to be.
The remaining five board members now have 90 days to review applications and appoint someone to represent District 2 (Greenwood, Ballard, Magnolia) and someone else for District 4 (Downtown, Queen Anne, Belltown and Fremont), since those are the quadrants with sudden vacancies.
Board President Liza Rankin promises more details at the district’s regular Wednesday meeting. But so far, communication around the process has been a tangle, and many questions remain, particularly around the possibility that both seats should have been up for election by voters last fall. Now, however, it appears that the current board majority will decide who fills them.
Thankfully, this city has a thoughtful new outlet for commentary and discussion about its ever-confounding school district, the Seattle Hall Pass podcast.
A recent episode dissected the resignation debacle, and ended with a series of perspectives, most notably that of former board director Kay Smith-Blum, who said having the current majority choose its new members — after abdicating oversight of the budget amid spiraling student performance — was a scenario that “should be of grave concern to all Seattle citizens.”
Other episodes covered the widespread disruption last fall when teachers and elementary students in more than 40 schools were shuffled into different classrooms a month after the year had begun; and the breaking news — leaked to the podcast — that Seattle, despite rumors to the contrary, would not close schools due to sagging enrollment. (At least, not this year.)
On the Hall Pass podcast, listeners get a deep dive into topics of interest to hosts Christie Robertson and Jane Tunks Demel, both of whom have children in Seattle Public Schools. Robertson, who ran unsuccessfully for the school board last year, is a special education advocate with a Ph.D. in neurobiology and behavior. She probes issues logically, carefully, like a scientist.
Tunks Demel, who moved north from the Bay Area with her family at the start of the pandemic, is a former journalist with a taste for digging. And one of the podcast’s standout qualities is its documentation, including interview transcripts. “Our biggest goal is to inform and to make it possible to join the conversation,” Tunks Demel said. “There’s pretty much zero entry points for community members to have their voices heard in Seattle Public Schools.”
The two offer sober analysis, sans slant. For district news with more attitude — and some conspiracy-minded commenters — there’s the Seattle Schools Community Forum, a long-running blog written by former SPS parent Melissa Westbrook, who devotes considerable energy to district goings-on though she no longer lives full-time in Washington.
Between the podcast, the blog and legacy media like public radio and this newspaper, Seattleites have an unusually rich ecosystem of education coverage.
Goodness knows, Seattle Public Schools needs as many eyes on it as possible.
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