Thank you, Ashley Rhead and the Seattle Department of Transportation, for donating 500 blinking backpack/jacket safety lights for our kids as part of their Vison Zero program. (And thank you also for going the extra mile and adding a Lowell-inspired dragon on these Lowell blue lights!)
SPS has a page with instructions for attending and giving testimony at board meetings, but parent Liza Rankin has some additional pro tips, especially on reserving a Wednesday spot on the Monday before:
I usually type up a quick email ahead of time and then right at 8:01 hit send. If you send it before 8 they won’t count it. I find emailing boardagenda@seattleschools.org easier than calling in. You have to include name, phone, email address. My email is something like:
“I would like to request speaking time for the board meeting on ________. My topic is ______.
Thanks,
Name
phone
email address”You can have people reserve times who might not want to speak themselves, just to get the slots, but the catch is that to give your time to someone else, you must be present at the meeting. So say you signed up to speak but were giving your time to me, we’d both need to be there in person and go up to the podium together, and you’d say into the mic “I cede my time to Liza Rankin” and then I could speak. No one can speak twice, so if I was also signed up myself, that wouldn’t work. Testimony is scheduled to begin at 5:30pm and the list of speakers gets posted online by 5pm the night before the meeting.
You cannot discuss personnel in testimony, so they’ll stop you if you say “person xyz wasn’t helpful” or “our prinicpal xyz” but you can say “we were not consulted or given any notice about these changes from district or building administration” or similar. Even though each person only gets 2 minutes to talk, you can print out additional info for the board and bring it with you.
The next board meeting is this coming Wednesday, 11/15, at 4:15, so that means requests to testify need to be sent at 8am this Monday. This is a good venue for all sorts of parent concerns, from the situation with our buses to just how problems relate to negative experiences for kids.
Many thanks to Blanket Coverage, the Richard Sherman Family Foundation, for donating over 200 backpacks, each loaded with school supplies! You can see them here with our assistant principal Mason:
It’s going to be a little quieter around school next week when our fifth-graders take off for Islandwood, a 250-acre outdoor learning center on Bainbridge Island. This extraordinary program is offered to elementary school students throughout the Puget Sound region.
This is not just a camping trip, as the Islandwood team reminded us at a recent parent-info night: Islandwood is school, and the work our students do there is completely integrated with the Lowell fifth-grade curriculum. Our fifth-graders will have the chance to learn about a variety of science topics, develop a sense of environmental stewardship, connect with and learn about the wildlife of our diverse bioregion, and work together to solve problems as they learn.
Our fifth-grade classes from Lowell are heading to Islandwood November 13-16! Even if you are not a fifth-grade parent, you can support our campers by donating a pillow, a blanket or sleeping bag, or a set of basic toiletries. (We could probably use five each of those.) Contact Ms. Laura if you can help—especially if you have any connection to a business that might be able to help—or if you missed the info night and have questions about the upcoming trip.
Lowell would like to invite veterans in our community to come and be honored at an assembly and informal reception this Thursday, November 10. (There is no school on Friday, November 11 in observance of Veterans Day.)
Veterans and their families are invited to attend a short reception at 2:15pm, followed by a school assembly from 2:50 to 3:20pm, where we will sing songs and a student will lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance. Veterans are invited to speak about their experiences if they wish.
For more information, email lowellparents@gmail.com.
A big thank-you to the QFC on 15th for helping supply pumpkins for our kiddos’ artwork at tonight’s Harvest Festival/Literacy Night. You will have made a lot of little people happy!
Many thanks to Chris Sondreal (Theo’s dad) for the high-powered hefting and drill-bit mastery involved in getting our Lowell Dragon alighted (alit?) on the cafeteria wall. Make sure you check it out sometime!
According to a longtime student who was kibbitzing nearby, many “FIRE” tickets may get affixed to this eventually. Those reports are unconfirmed.
We put out the call a little while back when the Lowell Food Pantry refrigerator had apparently given up the ghost—and now we’ve got a brand new one, the H.M.S. Frigidaire, pictured below humming away in the cafeteria!
Thank you to everyone who scrambled to find a fridge and look for alternate solutions—and a GIANT THANK-YOU to donor Kathy Cochran, who stepped up and got this beautiful new fridge.
If you’re not familiar with the Food Pantry, this is an ongoing program at Lowell, operated in partnership with the University District Food Bank. Each Friday, volunteers meet in the Lowell cafeteria after the start of school and help distribute weekend-meal bags for Lowell kids. Since over 60% of our students receive free or reduced cost lunch, and approximately a third are housing-insecure (living in shelters or other temporary housing), the Food Pantry is hugely important to us. For some of our kids, these food bags are their only reliable food over the weekend.
(If you’d like to volunteer to help the Food Pantry, contact lowellparents@gmail.com.)
When you’re talking to people outside of our school community, it often helps to have some quick facts about Lowell.
Our school has changed a lot in the last few years—it now *is* the downtown elementary school, with approximately a third of our kids living in homeless shelters or transitional housing (although that number fluctuates, given the instability of that population). Feel free to share this flier anywhere to help inspire support for Lowell.
If you were at the General Meeting last week, you know that our PTA membership voted to formally endorse the Housing for All Platform, created by a coalition that is working to address homelessness in Seattle.
With approximately a third of our students housing insecure (i.e., living in shelters or other temporary housing), this is a hugely important issue to our community. We joined many fellow endorsers, incuding the PTAs of McGilvra and Stevens.
Check out the Housing for All site for more information—especially the Take Action page if you want to know how you can help.
