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Triple Burrito Brain!

Dear Seattle Public Schools Community,

I hope this newsletter finds you well. I am so happy to write to you all this week.

We welcomed our Kindergarten and Pre-K students to school this week and continued with the second week of instruction for our first through 12th graders.

I was able to visit schools, talk to staff, students, and families, and generally get to see the wonderful things going on in our buildings.

Students were still getting to know their classmates and classrooms. Teachers were starting their curriculum, and our lunchrooms were fuller than ever with the advent of universal meals. I was very pleased with what I experienced, and I certainly hope our community was as well.

I am looking forward to visiting more schools this week and throughout the rest of the school year.

Today, I want to focus on a topic that seems to be front of mind for our elementary school community: recess.

Let me start by saying that recess is very important. Having time for unstructured play, to run around outside, socialize, and generally expend the copious amount of energy that our young people have is a very good thing.

And . . . we have to balance that need with the other competing concerns around school. When I got to Seattle, what I saw across the district was over 100 schools doing their own thing. Some of it was great, and some of it needed adjustment.

But the biggest concern I had was that some schools were teaching the state-mandated subjects, and others were not. Many classrooms I visited didn’t teach social studies, including the state-mandated John McCoy (lulilaš) Since Time Immemorial curriculum. There was also a lack of adherence to the math, ELA, and science curricula.

Instead, what I saw was incredibly hard-working teachers trying their best to meet the needs of their students without any sort of clear expectation around what a day should look like. So, what we got were some classes that did a lot of independent reading, some that did lots of small-group instruction, and some that did a lot of Social and Emotional Learning. Some did a lot of math; some didn’t do much math at all.

The instruction one 2nd grader got in one school looked very different from what a 2nd grader received in another school. To be clear, I love choice and flexibility, and I think our educators were doing the absolute best with the direction (or lack thereof) they were given. But there are standards we also need to address, and I was certainly worried we were not addressing them consistently.

So, for many months, we looked at what could be best for our kids. We just adopted a new ELA curriculum that calls for 120 minutes a day. We have a math curriculum that needs about 90 minutes a day and a science program that we felt needed about 45 minutes a day. We also wanted to make sure that every child got time for SEL, social studies, recess, specials such as art, music, library and P.E., and lunch. So, the Curriculum Department came up with a thoughtful schedule that looked at our current school day and tried to best fit what we needed.

Since around 75% of our elementary schools had two recesses, plus lunch, plus 100 minutes a week of PE, while around 25% of our elementary schools had three recesses, the standard schedule that was presented attempted to take into consideration not only the curricular needs of the students, but also the vast majority of current schedules.

However, since we recognize that each school is different and has different needs, we have created a waiver process so that principals can ask to modify the suggested daily schedule. And because we understand the need for flexibility around different ages, the waiver allows for a request for just Kindergarten as well as for the whole school.

It is certainly our hope to try to create cogent, clear, and concise programming so that families know what to expect from our schools, while also being understanding of individual schools and their needs.

We just have to make sure that all of the mandated learning occurs. This is why our principals, along with their Executive Directors and the Curriculum Department, have the ability to work together to address the needs of our students holistically.

I hope this makes sense.

Thank you all for believing in SPS. With your help and hard work, SPS truly will be the best urban public school district in the country.

Ben