Kentlake<\/a> Site Council little more than a year ago, I couldn\u2019t think of a good reason to say no. I agreed to participate.<\/p>\n<\/p>\nThen I forgot about it.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
A few weeks later I was at Bill Maxwell Stadium covering the Kentlake-Tahoma football game and Potts came down out of the stands to chat with me.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
At first I didn\u2019t recognize him. Potts was wearing a ball cap and somewhat more casual clothes than how I had seen him dressed before.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Honestly, it was the hat that threw me off. Anyway, after I figured out who this was, we talked a bit and he asked me if I was still planning to be on the Site Council. Oh. Yes.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
I asked when the first meeting would be and it was planned for a Wednesday. You know, I told him I couldn\u2019t do meetings on Wednesdays when he first asked me in late August. Up until just a few months ago, we laid out the paper on Wednesdays, which meant I often didn\u2019t get out of the office until 6 p.m. at the earliest on those days.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The Site Council meets at 6:30 at Kentlake.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Still, I agreed. I don\u2019t like to back out on something unless I have a good reason.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
When he asked me to be on the Site Council, Potts simply wanted to have a cross section of people from the Kentlake community involved, ranging from students to parents to politicians to teachers to community members.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
I fell into the \u201ccommunity member\u201d category from his perspective. Trust me, I asked him twice why he wanted me to be on the Site Council, I wanted to be sure he was serious.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
We never discussed the idea of my writing about it.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
He never asked me to and until the first meeting, I wasn\u2019t really planning to, either.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
But, then I went, I saw all this data, the student climate survey from the spring of 2010 and knowing where Kentlake was in terms of Adequate Yearly Progress, I was confused about what had happened at the school \u2014 especially considering it happened right under my nose.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
When I realized I had a lot of questions I wanted to get answers to, I decided it was worth documenting the process, so I asked Potts if it was OK if I wrote about the meetings.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
He said he didn\u2019t mind.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
And he never tried to influence what I wrote. Potts has made Kentlake totally accessible to me, which has allowed for a level of transparency most governments don\u2019t allow or even aspire to, so it seemed an opportunity to give people a look into the workings of a public high school.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
My columns about the Site Council have generated feedback from people I would have never expected it from and the one thing people consistently tell me they read are those pieces.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t really know if they would have an audience but even people who don\u2019t have a vested interest in Kentlake\u2019s future are watching through my columns.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Someone recently told me it seemed like my being on the Site Council could be a conflict of interest.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t view it that way.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
First, I don\u2019t live in the Kent School District, I don\u2019t have kids in school and so my only job is to provide the perspective of an interested, hopefully objective third party observer.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Secondly, anyone who knows Joe Potts knows he\u2019s not the kind of person who would manipulate a group like this, though he has told me he appreciates the positive coverage I have done of Kentlake.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
From my perspective, I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve sugar coated any of the issues Kentlake has dealt with in the past few years, nor the challenges Potts has faced since taking over as principal.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
And in visiting Susan Best\u2019s journalism class at Kentlake on Sept. 29, I\u2019ve come to the conclusion that while the school has made strides in the past year or so since Potts arrived, it seems like until the class of 2013 graduates there will remain lingering bitterness among students who were at the school under previous principal Diana Pratt.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
OK, in fairness, that\u2019s what the kids told me.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The overall vibe at Kentlake seems better than it did when I spent two days there talking to students and visiting classes last year.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Of course, it could still just be the 6-0 start for the football team. A year ago students told me morale was significantly boosted by the success of the Falcons football team. It continues to have an impact this year.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
There are still complaints. Not everything Potts has brought to Kentlake has been embraced by students such as the dance policies and accompanying contract they must sign in order to go to school dances.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
But, these are things that are more typical for teens to complain about.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
I suspect there will always be some discord between adults and students because of what grown ups want teens to do while they\u2019re at school. The kind of stuff that\u2019s reasonable for adults to expect and equally reasonable for kids to find unreasonable because they want to be treated like adults even if they can\u2019t seem to act like it all the time.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
One thing that remains a consensus is the students love Potts. They appreciate that he\u2019s involved, that he doesn\u2019t hole up in his office, that he makes an effort to get to know them as individuals.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
So, he\u2019s got that going for him, at least.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
With all that in mind, the first Site Council meeting of this school year is set for Oct. 26. After that I plan to tell you about what things will look like for us this year. I am hoping for some new members.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
I would still like to see students on the council. I\u2019ll probably throw in some more information about what the students in the journalism class told me, as well.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
In the meantime I am working on a story that will segue nicely between this column and the first piece on the Site Council. I will be writing about test scores, end of course assessments, interventions and what all that information means to Tahoma and Kent school district students as well as staff. Hopefully that will run in the Oct. 21 issue.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Education writing always gives me more to think about and more questions to ask than I end up answering but if you believe in lifelong learning as I do then it should be that way.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019m the kind of person who doesn\u2019t say no very often.
\nSo, when Principal Joe Potts asked me to be on the Kentlake Site Council little more than a year ago, I couldn\u2019t think of a good reason to say no. I agreed to participate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-3009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3009"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3009"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3009\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3009"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=3009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}