Hello Salmon Bay Families!

As July comes to a close, many of us are turning our thoughts to the beginning of school - whether that means squeezing every little bit of adventure out of August, or stocking up on school supplies before the mad rush.

We have a few FOSB bits & pieces that we'd like to share with you - and then you can go off and enjoy your last month of summer!

We look forward to seeing everyone back at school in September!

Save the Date for These Upcoming Events:

Note: if you would like to publicize an event here, please reach out to fosbnewsletter@gmail.com with relevant details.

Monday, 8/19- Friday, 8/23, 9am -12pm: Kindergarten Jump Start

Thursday, 8/29 5:45-7pm: 6th grade orientation

Tuesday 9/3, 9a-12p: 6th grade WEB led orientation

Wednesday, 9/4: First Day of school (not early release)

Monday, 9/9: First Day of school for kindergarten

Friday, 9/13 9:25: FOSB Community Coffee (after Friday Sing in the cafeterium)

Thursday, 9/19 6:30pm: FOSB September board meeting (in school library)

Friday, 9/27 4-6:30pm: Pizza on the Playground

Volunteer Needs & Opportunities:

All Together for Seattle Schools - Option School Advocacy

A number of option schools are putting their heads together for some collective advocacy to the district regarding option schools. It’s still unclear which schools the district plans to close, but in the event that they are targeting option schools a group of parents are working on a response. Salmon Bay could use a coupe of people to plug into this effort and share out with our community. They plan to meet weekly on Zoom through August. Are you interested and available to be that person for our community? Contact FOSB Chairs Julie & Shannon for more info.

Find more information about All Together for Seattle Schools here.

Building Community Initiative 

The heart of Salmon Bay K-8 is an inclusive, positive, supportive, and playful sense of belonging to a village of families on a learning journey with their children. The FOSB Building Community Initiative seeks to support this community spirit by facilitating communication and connection among families within and between grade-levels in fun and meaningful ways. This work is done through the collaboration among grade-level parent representatives. If you're interested in learning more and helping out, please email Chase Treisman. We aim to host a meeting towards the beginning of the school year to get the ball rolling!

FOSB Communications support

With so many events, activities and news happening in our community, streamlined communications are always a top priority for FOSB. We are building a communications committee to facilitate these needs, and hoping to work closely with school staff to make important information easier to find and distribute!

Is this a strength of yours? We are looking for volunteers to help with the following:

FOSB website updates: Tasks will include updating information on FOSB’s main site; anything from editing current pages, to adding new pages as needed. An additional, and very important task, is adding events to our FOSB calendar. Possible content creation as well. It may be helpful if you’re already familiar with WordPress, but we’re happy to train as needed. 

Newsletter Content: Last school year FOSB put out a weekly newsletter independent of the school. Ms. Dixon is interested in recombining our two newsletters for this coming year. Additional people to help pull together and streamline the newsletter process would be welcome. Tasks may include content creation, following up on submissions for more information, etc. We may also need to problem solve flexible ways to combine the FOSB newsletter with the school newsletter; if you’re a creative thinker and good communicator, please let us know if you’d like to help!

School Website Assistance: Looking for a parent volunteer to be the webmaster for the Salmon Bay website.This is not a specific FOSB volunteer need, but one for the school. This person would work with Tae and Ms. Dixon to get information updated- things like calendar, supply lists, BLT minutes, open house tours/slideshows and information. This person would also work to get pertinent information to the general community, via the newsletter or the FOSB Facebook page. 

FOSB Facebook Page: Are you on Facebook mindlessly scrolling already? If you’d like to add some purpose to that, consider helping manage the FOSB Facebook page. Tasks mainly consist of creating images for events (if not supplied by organizer), creating Facebook events for FOSB sanctioned events, and occasionally creating other FOSB specific informational posts. We will train anyone interested in our current process! Please note, this is different from the Salmon Bay Community FB group. The FOSB FB page consists of events and informational posts that are then shared to the community group or appropriate grade groups. 

We are still figuring out how all of these communications roles work together, and it’s possible that one person can take on more than one of these roles. We will be meeting on Thursday, August 29th to discuss communications strategies for the upcoming year. Time and place TBD. If you’re interested, or would like more information, please email Erin Rosenberg or FOSB Chairs Julie & Shannon.

Other News:

Salmon Bay waitlists

Julie, FOSB co-chair, has been watching the waitlist reports that the district provides and has been in touch with about 20% of the 122 families hoping to get into SB. It appears that the district has moved their way through the middle school waitlists (started at 49, now at 3) and middle school students have been offered spots. There hasn’t been significant movement in the elementary grades yet (started at 66, now at 59). However, it’s possible that they will still move people into elementary grades - there appears to still be room in K-3 - up until the very end of summer as they have in years past.

If you know families on the waitlist, please encourage them to reach out to the district, repeatedly if necessary, to continue movement into Salmon Bay.

Letter to Seattle City Council

This article includes a sign-on letter to Seattle City Council encouraging them to approve $20M in spending on youth mental health. This needs to get through the City's Finance committee first, so if you agree with this spending shift, you're encouraged to write your Councilmembers directly, (especially Rivera, Strauss, and Kettle) in addition to signing this form letter. The city pitching in means less of a financial burden on SPS.

Talk to Your Kids About School Closures: A Guide

North Beach Elementary PTA members shared guidance on how to talk to our kids about school closures and consolidations. Find the link here; it's got some great advice: 

School Closure Information Resources

Here are some useful slides, shared with permission, regarding school closures and SPS funding presented on a North Beach PTO Zoom call on July 17. Some of the slides are specific to North Beach, but most of this material is relevant for all elementary schools in Seattle.

Contact Your State Legislators

Here is an easy way to take action in in the conversation surrounding school closures and district budget deficits. Click here to send an email to your local legislators; the website will automatically find your legislators, and provide an email template that you can customize as you wish. Please consider taking the few minutes that it takes to send a message to our legislature that school funding is important and necessary.

Get to know the PTO (that's FOSB!):

Stay Connected & Get Involved!

While you automatically receive emails from Salmon Bay K-8 administration, staff, and teachers on all things school-supported and classroom related, it doesn’t always include FOSB-related events, opportunities, and information. Tap into these information pipelines to stay connected and find ways to get involved.

• FOSB Calendar
• FOSB Friday Bulletins 
• FOSB Facebook
• Grade Google and Facebook groups (request to join)
• FOSB Committees
• Monthly Board Meetings
• Monthly Community Coffee (held before the first Friday Sing of each month)

You can support Friends of Salmon Bay in everyday ways, like shopping at a merchant of your choice or searching online. Details about programs offered by Fred Meyer, Bing, and Office Depot/Office Max are on our website. Consider signing up!

Community Announcements:

We are excited to inform you that the GEMS program is now planning to be back in person during the 2024-2025 school year! GEMS (Girls in Engineering, Math and Science) is an after school STEM program for 7th and 8th grade girls who are students in a Seattle public school. Sponsored by the Association for Women in Science (Seattle Chapter), GEMS is a free, volunteer-run, after-school science enrichment program that explores STEM fields as diverse as forensics, robotics, neuroscience, and astrophysics. We offer a variety of activities led by women scientists currently employed in these fields as well as several field trips throughout the year. In the past we’ve had a range of field trips such as coding activities at Google and educational tide pool walks in conjunction with the Seattle Aquarium.

GEMS meetings will be held once a month for most of the school year (most likely November to April) and will occur in the evening from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. We will have an application available early next school year with further details. 

Girls in Engineering, Math, and Science (GEMS)

2024-2025 Co-Chairs: Ria Purohit, Sulagna Bharati, Jiang Shang

& 2023-2025 Co-Chairs: Tia Low, Lourdes Tsukada

https://seattleawis.org/gems/

Association for Women in Science - Seattle Chapter

In The Making, a Ballard art studio, is offering creativity camps for kids over the summer. Adult camps also offered. Check our website for more information.

SPS Safe Schools Hotline: 206-252-0510.

The Seattle School District Safety and Security Department is staffed 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.