Just announced by the Sanislo Elementary PTA:

Our Principal, Ernie Seevers, will be retiring at the end of this year, and the school community has begun a transition process for transitioning to new leadership. There are hiring committees meeting in the next few weeks to recommend a candidate to Superintendent Banda for hiring. Carmela Dellino, our West Seattle executive director for schools, has met with our staff to hear their ideas about the skills and strengths that they believe the new leader at Sanislo will need, and she would like to do the same with families. She has scheduled a meeting at Sanislo Tuesday (TOMORROW) at 3:40 to talk with you. Please make a point to come in and meet with other families and share in a conversation with Ms Dellino. Your thoughts are important and valuable in this process. Children are, of course very welcome to attend with you, and we’ll also have supervised play for the children that don’t like meetings.

Story and photos by Jason Grotelueschen
Reporting for West Seattle Blog

People call him “Mr. Toilet,” and for Jack Sim, nothing could make him more proud.

Sim, founder of the World Toilet Organization, flew from Singapore to deliver the keynote presentation of World Water Week at Chief Sealth International High School on Tuesday night. It’s the school’s third annual WWW, billed as a “local ideas festival.” This year’s theme, according to student leaders, is centered around toilets, sanitation and health – a truly global issue with truly local connotations.

Sealth students worked tirelessly to plan this week’s events, along with social studies teacher Noah Zeichner, who serves as faculty leader for the project.

(Sealth teacher Noah Zeichner, left, with Jack Sim and an audience member.)

Tuesday’s night’s events kicked off with a Water and Health Resource Fair, featuring a jam-packed hallway of research projects and presentations from Sealth 9th-graders:

In an adjacent hallway, representatives from a variety of organizations like King County, Splash.org, and Friendly Water for the World were on-hand to talk to visitors. We also spotted “Diver Laura” James from Puget Soundkeeper Alliance and the tox-ick.org campaign:

After the resource fair, a big crowd gathered in the Sealth auditorium for a brief awards ceremony and a few remarks from event organizers, before Sim took the stage for his keynote address about toilets, sanitation and public health.

As Sim explained, the global statistics are staggering:

• 2.6 billion people lack access to a toilet and to basic sanitation (40% of the world’s population)
• 4.1 billion people live in areas with no wastewater/excreta treatment
• 1.5 million kids under the age of 5 die from diarrhea each year

Without proper sanitation and disposal, human waste ends up out in the open or in the rivers and groundwater, further spreading disease. For Sim, who achieved success as a young businessman in Singapore but has now made public health his life’s work for 13 years, his goal is simple but lofty — “I want everybody on planet Earth to have access to clean toilets, any day, any time.” He believes that improved sanitation on a global scale is a goal that can be achieved in 15-20 years with the proper support, and he’s pleased to see people around the world start to rally behind the cause.

To get people talking about such a taboo topic, Sim said he’s worked hard to use humor and a close partnership with the media.  The results have been impressive — Sim’s efforts are supported by big names like Bill Gates and Bill Clinton, and by world leaders and government officials everywhere. The Gates Foundation estimates that the outreach efforts have reached 3.3 billion people, and is starting to truly change the conversation.

“When we first started doing this,” Sim said, “no politicians wanted to have their picture taken next to a toilet. Now, they compete!”

Sim showed a series of photos of global “sit-ins” (essentially, huge groups of people sitting on toilets or assuming a “squat” pose in public), holding signs and talking about the issue, along with speeches and stand-up comedy events all designed to erase the stigma and talk about the problems. Social media has been a powerful tool as well, according to Sim. He recalled that on World Toilet Day (November 19) in 2010, the movie release of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” fell on the same day — “we saw that toilets were trending on Twitter, one spot behind Harry Potter, and we beat Justin Bieber!”

In addition to increasing public support for dealing with sanitation issues, Sim emphasized the importance of education when it comes to the recipients of that support. In some very poor areas of the world, the usage of toilets is a totally unfamiliar concept. “When you give someone water, they know exactly what to do with it,” Sim said. “But if you give them a toilet, they may not know what to do.” Sim added that in some parts of the world, people avoid using what few toilets may be available, either because the facilities are unsanitary or because they’re located in areas that are unsafe or violent.

Next up for Sim? He headed to New York City today to meet with United Nations officials to discuss making World Toilet Day a “UN Official Day” worldwide. “Wish me luck!” he said.

Sim closed his presentation by showing two videos previously mentioned by WSB, featuring celebrity Matt Damon’s personal “strike” against global sanitation issues (saying that the toilet has “saved more lives than any invention in human history,”) and Sealth students’ creative response to that campaign. Sim praised the efforts of Sealth students and teachers in raising awareness and getting involved, and encouraged them to keep it up.

Sim’s appearance was co-sponsored by Town Hall Seattle. You can support Sealth students’ efforts by visiting their fundraising page, and learn more about Sim’s work in the video below:

For the third year, it’s World Water Week at Chief Sealth International High School – and the students/staff are hoping to shake us out of taking clean water/sanitation for granted. So many in the U.S. have it; so many in the rest of the world don’t. It’s a life-and-death topic, and yet it can be discussed with humor and inspiration – which is what you’ll hear from the man who’s traveled from the other side of the world to give the keynote speech tomorrow night, Jack Sim, founder of the World Toilet Organization.

(From left, Sealth students Natalia, Riley, Syd, Tasha, with, center, teacher Noah Zeichner and Jack Sim)
He’s at the school today, and speaks at 7 pm Tuesday in the Sealth auditorium, right after a 6 pm resource fair at the school, and you’re welcome to attend the event for free. (Donations are welcome – here! – to support the ongoing WWW-related awareness-raising work, though.)

(Photos courtesy club volunteer coach Anne Higuera)
Robotics continue to grow in popularity at local schools – including the new LEGO Robotics Club that K-5 STEM at Boren launched just two months ago, with 50 students already participating. The photos are from a field trip this past Thursday to the UW Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering, where grad students, writes club parent volunteer Christy Monge, “showed off robotic fish and some other projects that involve flight.

“The STEM students were invited downstairs to the tank where the robotic fish are tested, and were able to pilot the fish around the pool. … They also monitored the robot’s progress on a laptop computer below and tried out some of the tools and equipment, feeling right at home.”

Six teams from K-5 STEM are also getting ready to compete in the big FIRST Robotics Expo event at CenturyLink Field Event Center on March 30th.

Six years after Seattle Public Schools closed Fairmount Park Elementary (map), there’s news in what you DON’T see in that photo (shared by Deborah) – the old portables that had remained on the closed campus were demolished by district laborers following asbestos abatement by district maintenance,” district spokesperson Teresa Wippel confirms to WSB. She says they “had been vandalized and were beyond repair.” And this is also a sign that renovation and addition work on the Fairmount Park campus is getting closer. According to Wippel, the district will advertise for bids starting Monday, will open them in mid-April, and expects construction to start “sometime in mid-May. Construction activities will last until mid-July, 2014, with move-in immediately following.” The work includes a wing of new classrooms so that it would be able to handle to 500 students. The district has yet to announce whether it plans to reopen Fairmount Park as a neighborhood school or something else (such as home to K-5 STEM, which is in its first year of operation and temporarily housed at the Boren campus).

Two notes this afternoon from Seattle Public Schools HQ:

PARTIAL HIRING-SPENDING FREEZE: The district says that because of an expected $18 million budget shortfall for next year and uncertainty over how the Legislature will handle school funding, SPS is “implementing a non-critical hiring and spending freeze until further notice. This freeze is expected to save at least $2.5 million, which can be carried over to assist in building a balanced 2013-14 budget.” The district announcement stresses, “Critical positions that are needed for either safety or classroom instruction are excluded from this freeze.” (Full announcement here.)

STRATEGIC-PLAN MEETINGS: As the district updates its “strategic plan” – we recently linked to an online survey – it’s planning five community meetings. Here in West Seattle, there’s one at 6:30 pm Tuesday, April 2nd, in the auditorium at Chief Sealth International High School (interpreters will be available for Spanish, Somali, Vietnamese, Chinese, Tagalog, Amharic). Read about the strategic-plan process here; the School Board is expected to get a first look at the proposed plan for its June 19th meeting.

(Photos by Nick Adams for WSB)
It was a lesson to remember. West Seattle Montessori teacher Matt Whittemore invited us to stop by as he fired up a hands-on learning experience in his backyard last Saturday. Whittemore’s class (the Horned Owls 1-3) has been studying early man; their culminating project was glazing pottery and seeing it fired in a backyard kiln and pots in the Raku pottery method. WSB contributing photojournalist Nick Adams captured the scenes.

“Our unit of study coincided with our study of early man and his basic needs and our yearly school auction,” Whittemore explained. “During our class conversations, we talked about basic needs such as eating, shelter, and clothes and where those items came from. The goal was to get the students thinking about what it might have been like to have to discover everything. Humans only had their natural resources to learn, utilize, and adapt from. So, I did some research on the ‘Raku’ style of pottery and took on the project.”

“The kids made the pots in the classroom in small groups. We air-dried them and then Bethany Woll bisque-fired them to remove any moisture and prepare them for glazing.”

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