There’s Something New for Everyone this Week
No matter what your special interest is, this week brought an announcement of something new on the way just for you:
🏈 ⚽️ For our littlest sports fans and players, SPS is soliciting feedback on the design of new athletic fields coming to Lower Woodland Park in a few years’ time.
🧮 🤓 For our young math enthusiasts, SPS has just introduced new accelerated math pathways for students transitioning into middle school.
📚🐛 For our budding bookworms, SPS has just adopted a new K-5 English Language Arts curriculum. (I’ll write about this one separately.)
🏛️ 🇺🇸 And finally, for the civic-minded among us: last week’s rally against school closures made the news! Thanks to Sac’s very own IA Aaron Moore for speaking at the rally. You can hear him in action in the linked clip.
There’s something for everyone!
Jump ahead for more detail on:
New athletic fields are coming to Lower Woodland Park
SPS is fielding—get it?—three proposals for adding a new football field to Lower Woodland Park. Although the new field will be managed by Seattle Parks and Recreation, it will also be the home athletic field for SPS’s Lincoln High School, which is why SPS is involved.
The proposals differ in their placement of the new field (see photo), as well as in their impact on existing fields—some proposals upgrade or move the existing soccer field—and their impact on trees and parking. The proposals range from $8.6 to $11.5 million, with estimated completion times ranging from fall of 2028 to fall of 2029.
The details of the three proposals, as presented by SPS in a community meeting on Saturday, can be found here. More detailed coverage of the field development process and Saturday’s meeting is in the The Bulletin, written by yours truly.
Lower Woodland Park, with purple boxes showing the two locations where football and/or soccer fields would be built under the three proposals being considered. This is an SPS slide from the April 25 community meeting.
Public feedback is encouraged here until May 9. SPS will choose a final proposal over the summer, and it will then go to Seattle Parks and Recreation for approval and next steps.
Readers who frequent Wallingford may know already that the Lincoln building abuts a public park which is also adjacent to Hamilton Middle School. While this park is the most obvious site for a school field, community pushback from some Wallingford neighbors during the original planning phases led SPS to drop Wallingford Playfield from consideration. That decision appears to be final.
Lincoln reopened in 2019 after a rebuild as the only comprehensive SPS high school without an athletic field. Since then, Lincoln athletes have been bussing to other facilities for practices and games. At the community meeting, one parent described that her daughter buses up to Ingraham High School (five miles north) for track practice. Practice starts at 7pm after Ingraham athletes are finished using their facilities, with the Lincoln students returning home after 9pm.
Aerial view of the Wallingford neighborhood showing: Lincoln HS and Hamilton MS (pink); the adjacent Wallingford Playfield no longer being considered as a location for the athletic fields (green, lower right); and the sites involved in the three field proposals currently being considered (green, top). Illustration by Beth Day.
Accelerated math options for graduating fifth graders
At last Wednesday’s board meeting—and in Superintendent Shuldiner’s most recent “Sunday email”—SPS unveiled a new pathway that would allow math-adept students at neighborhood schools to accelerate into advanced math classes. The program was successfully piloted last year.
The new program will advance its students by two years (in math only) during the year after fifth grade. Doing so will place them on par with peers who attended HC cohort schools by the start of seventh grade.
The acceleration involves taking sixth grade math as an online, self-paced, 12 -week course during the summer after 5th grade. Then, in sixth grade, students will take the accelerated math 7/8 class that is already offered at every SPS middle school. This will align them to the existing HC math track: algebra in seventh grade and geometry in eighth, with calculus taken in the junior year of high school.
The presentation did not clarify how geometry will be provided to all students accelerated in this way when they hit eighth grade. Today, geometry is taught only at the middle schools that host HC cohorts. Jane Addams Middle School (JAMS), which is the middle school that Sac students attend by default, is already such a school.
Letters of invitation to the families of this year’s 555 eligible fifth graders went out on April 23.
Eligible students include those who are HC-designated but chose to remain at their neighborhood school (Sac has nine such students). A quarter of invited students are not HC-designated, but were identified via their performance on the math component of the MAP assessment.
The online course will open as early as May, though participating students certainly don’t have to start that early. Highly Capable Director Dr. Paula Montgomery mentioned that some elementary teachers might be able to support students who begin the online course during the final months of their fifth grade year.
With this new program in place, roughly 23% of next year’s SPS sixth graders will be taking math 7 or above.