A message from the Superintendent

June 22, 2011

Dear Seattle Public Schools families,

As we close the 2010-11 school year, I want to thank all of you for your continued support of our schools. While this school year has seen many challenges for our district, our students continued to thrive and roughly 2,600 seniors graduated last week.

Last week I had the great pleasure of seeing many of those 2,600 students walk across the graduation stage. This is one of my favorite weeks of the year. As I told our graduates, this is the day that each of us in Seattle Public Schools works for – seeing them graduate from our district ready for college, career and life. 

Since being appointed Interim Superintendent in March, I have had the opportunity to meet with and hear from many people in our community: families and staff during my office hours, listening sessions with teachers, coffee chats with diverse community organizations and meetings with various stakeholder groups. What I have learned has contributed to many of the changes we have made. We are leaner, having reduced central administration to 6 percent of the overall budget, while at the same time, we are evaluating how the central office can better support our schools.

We have much to be proud of here in Seattle Public Schools, but we also have significant work to do. We all agree that we must set high expectations for our students and in doing so eliminate our achievement gaps. Recognizing this, in the coming months we will be launching a district-wide focus called AGREE: Attacking Gaps/Raising Expectations Everywhere.

Over the next few months we will be identifying what is working in our schools, engaging families in identifying barriers to student success and also working with our families and the broader community to create solutions for student success. This will be a priority for our work in the 2011-12 school year. We look forward to working with you to help improve your child’s education, and the education for each of our 47,000 students. When we close our achievement gap, we raise expectations for everyone.

I look forward to continuing to partner with you in the upcoming school year and I commit to remaining accessible, including hosting monthly office hours and providing timely communication and information to families. Thank you for all you do to ensure the success of your student and for supporting us in this very important work.


Dr. Susan Enfield
Interim Superintendent
Seattle Public Schools

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