Seattle Public School Track and Field Meets Should be scheduled as an extracurricular activity. The current scheduled meet time of 2:45 pm is before the final bell of all Seattle Public School High Schools and necessitates up to 2.5 hours of missed instructional time per athlete per week. By signing this petition, I ask that Seattle Public Schools schedule extracurricular activities after the closing bell of the day in order to support the students, teacher and staff who participate, coach or instruct athletes.

Background

The 2017 Seattle Public Schools (SPS) Track Schedule for Boys and Girls includes 2:45 pm meet start times. This means that most of the meets are scheduled to start during school hours for SPS, making it difficult to term this an extracurricular activity. The SPS Athletics office has indicated the decision to start meets while school is still in session is actually a multifaceted decision that was not made exclusively on transportation dollars. However, the SPS Athletics office has not provided a list of other factors contributing to the schedule.

In order to arrive in time for the meet, students will need to be leaving school by ~ 12:45. This constitutes 2.5 hours of missed class time weekly during Track and Field Season. When multiplied by the number of athletes competing across the SPS district, the amount of missed instructional time totals in the tens of thousands of hours.

Summary

Thousands of classroom hours missed due to scheduling of Track and Field meets is an unacceptable program within the Seattle Public Schools. The signers of this petition ask that Seattle Public Schools revisit the scheduling of Track and Field meets and move these to start after school and disclose all of the issues associated with such a decision for the 2016-17 school year.