In case you missed the first announcement Jan. 23 or the numerous mentions here since — if you have anything even resembling an opinion about, or a stake in, what is decided about rebuilding Denny Middle School and renovating Chief Sealth High School — the essential questions being whether or not they will share a campus, and how much of a renovation CSHS will get — Monday night is the first of two meetings whose importance cannot be overestimated. (Official flyer here.) In one sense, everyone in West Seattle has a stake in this — technically, if you look at where the $125-ish million is coming from, everyone in the city does (district documents describe this as “the most expensive project the District has attempted”). But if you can’t get motivated on that level: Is there a child of any age, high school or younger, in your family? Is there a chance you’ll become a parent someday? For the entire West Seattle peninsula, there are two public non-alternative middle schools and two public non-alternative high schools; what’s involved in this decisionmaking process comprises half of that. Think about it one more time before you conclude you don’t care much about how this turns out. The meeting is in the Chief Sealth Library on Monday night, starting with a “gallery walk” 6:30 pm where drawings can be viewed and one-on-one conversations can be had before the meeting starts at 7 (more here). After this meeting, the Westwood Neighborhood Council has its panel discussion on the project Feb. 12 (news release here) — also an important meeting — then on Feb. 13, the School Board will be presented with the recommended choice, prior to what is billed as the final vote Feb. 27. To get a sense of some of the discussion, check out the comments in just about everything posted here in the WSB Denny/Sealth archive (link here; find that link anytime from the WSB Categories list in the sidebar at right), but the comments that the district says will matter the most are the ones it gets at and after Monday’s presentation. (Board contact info here.)

SIDE NOTE – WHERE’S THE OFFICIAL WEB INFO? The drawing atop this post is from the Westwood Neighborhood Council site, posted last summer. This is because background info is difficult if not impossible to find on the Seattle Public Schools website; Denny-Sealth is not even on the “current issues” list on this resource page (though the West Seattle HS schedule issue is); the only project page we can find on the SPS site offers a couple of bullet points here, pointing to a “project update” page here that says “Updates coming soon.” In October, the district promised a special website at buildingexcellence.org (see the flyer at the bottom of this post and see the district rep’s comment here) … it’s still not up. We have messages out to the district to ask if there’s somewhere else we should be looking. (Just discovered that School Board member Harium Martin-Morris posted Jan. 24 in this thread on his blog that he was “working with district staff” to get the drawings up on the district site. That was nine days ago. We can upload a Power Point presentation or pretty much any other doc to this website in a matter of minutes.) 6:50 PM UPDATE: We did get same-day responses to the notes we sent today to the district’s communications leadership and to West Seattle’s school board rep Steve Sundquist. He says he’s not aware of anywhere that the latest schematics/info can be found now on the district website but expects it will be updated in tandem with Monday’s meeting and is calling the project manager to check; district communications manager Patti Spencer says, “The schematics absolutely should be up on the Web but don’t know if they are. I apologize on behalf of SPS. The BEX Websites are created and maintained by the BEX staff. I don’t think there is anything I can do to make that happen over the weekend, but will talk with Fred Stephens to see if we can get something posted on Monday – latest Tuesday. I know that Fred is totally committed to providing easy-to-access and timely information.”