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For what it's worth, as people go to vote, it's very important to keep in mind all the things that we do in Mentorship. The SEL, Exhibition launch, assemblies, SLCs, Naviance, House activities...much of what we do in Mentorship is integral to what LHS aspires to be (and a lot of that is required by the district and the state.) So a vote against Mentorship doesn't make those things go away. They just complicate things as we try to put them someplace else...and that normally will fall to the core subject classes since they see all the students.

So please think of the bigger picture and vote in favor of the waiver.

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The vast majority of students attend and approve of mentorship. There is belonging, culture-building, and friendship in mentorship. It provides equitable access to pieces of high school experience that are outside of academics but make students better in the classroom and buy into the rest of school. We can always ALWAYS improve it, tweak it, and support mentor teachers better and we should! But it needs to exist in order to do that. Please vote in favor of the waiver.

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Mentorship is aspirational but does not meet our needs; let's  shorten and tuck an extra 15 minutes into an academic period. 

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Mentorship is aspirational but does not meet our needs; let's  shorten and tuck an extra 15 minutes into an academic period. 

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LMentorship began with glorious aspirations, and it remains aspirational. Too much of mentorship time is wasted because we don't need 45 minutes, ever. Too much time is spent on make-work (invented activities that don't serve a purpose or help, but just fill time). That kind of mentorship activity lacks authenticity and kids feel it and grow cynical. They talk about the meaninglessness (some of my best discussions have actually been on how meaninglessness undermines activities). So we end up with occasional meaningful tasks, which my mentorship accomplishes in a few minutes. The idea of SEL sounds good until it doesn't work, because of group dynamics or because the activities are not engaging or authentic. Eye rolling results when a powerpoint attempts to fill time with empty content. Cynicism results when tasks are meaningless. So kids beg to go roam, visit friends, play ball outside. Let's shorten mentorship and tuck it into an academic period; then, if the activities take less time, class could resume and get things done. I have seen this in other schools and it works. I plan to vote against the waiver.

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Not sure the vast majority of students buy into mentorship...

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Not sure the vast majority of students buy into mentorship...

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and one problem we have to solve at LHS is to create a sense of identity for the school, a sense of belonging and engagement for 1400 or more students coming right out of COVID and also with a large number of faculty new to the school. The answer, in my experience of schools, is to create momentum towards belonging through quality and intellectual impetus of academic experience and activities. Many teachers create this already in their academic classrooms. Activities including arts and sports play a giant role in creating community, with far greater impact than mentorship can ever achieve. And we saw more students buy in to crazy hat day than we've ever seen buy in to mentorship and its makeshift array of activities. I'm inclined to vote against the waiver.

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I am not against MENTORSHIP, but I am against teachers + staff not being paid for their professional & hard work. If the administration (and or district) feels this work is important they should pay teachers for said work.

Continuing to be complicit in the exploitation of teachers will only set further precedent that teachers are willing to give more and more for less and less. This is not only unjust, unfair, and unwarranted, it is also not sustainable.

Additional points:

-Many Lincoln High School teachers/staff do not have the economic privilege to afford cars or houses as a teacher in Seattle. Agreeing to do more work for free adds to the their burden disproportionately.

-Class loads are not distributed equally or equitably. Some teachers teach 2 unique class preps w/ two free prep periods as a 1.0FTE; others have 5 unique class preps.

-If you are a member of SEA who is not in a position that features a MENTORSHIP, please consider the ramifications of a vote that affects colleagues more greatly than oneself.

-Boteilho-sensei

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Not what it could be, no dedicated time to make it better.

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Not what it could be, no dedicated time to make it better.

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As a teacher new to this school, I was expecting mentorship to be a place of connection, social-emotional learning, and a time when we could all collectively heal from the trauma of the continuing pandemic. It has mostly been a place of telling students rules and telling them how to behave and telling them to do Naviance and telling them they'll be doing exhibitions and threatening them with no credit if they don't.

My 9th graders could care less if they get credit for mentorship and came into LHS thinking that mentorship was a waste of time. It's hard to say they're wrong. We've done very little to make this time worthwhile for them and without dedicated prep time for it, I'm unable to make my mentorship mean something for my students as I'm already working harder than ever just to keep afloat. Therefore, mentorship is a time I dread every week. It is definitely one of the factors I take into account when I think about staying here or not.

I would say it would be more useful to give students extra lunch time to bond and to give teachers extra time to prepare during the school day instead of every weekend. It would also be useful to have a study hall instead of a mentorship.

As is, I'll be voting no.

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I hear you, but I'm voting for the waiver. 

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I hear you, but I'm voting for the waiver. 

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Can't say mentorship is perfect but I do appreciate all of the hard work that goes into it. I also find it absolutely ridiculous that we have to waive our collective bargaining rights in order to do this. We should be paid for it.

However, I think we are much better off reforming mentorship from within. Having a teacher that students know will support them all four years is valuable. A lot of what we want to have it be was disrupted due to covid-19.

I am voting for the waiver and regardless of the outcome of this vote, I will circulate a form for hopefully all to sign to push SEA to prioritize a paid mentorship for all schools in negotiations this summer.

I hear all your concerns but I hope we will vote for this waiver and then send a strong message afterwards to SEA.

Anthony D'Amico

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If I thought admin would listen when we ask that the first two weeks of school not involve daily hours of Mentorship....

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If I thought admin would listen when we ask that the first two weeks of school not involve daily hours of Mentorship....

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I might vote for the waiver. But when we asked, in the past, we were ignored and had to put up with shortened class periods so that we could have a painful hourlong Mentorship every day at the start

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While mentorship is not perfect, and sometimes is even really hard, I believe in what it can be with a little time and investment in the program, as well as additional work on designing something that works for Lincoln. We have barely had the chance to give it a real shot.

I think that setting aside time each week to specifically be non-academic is really important, as school is more than academics. We have no time built into our existing curriculum or schedule for students to develop support skills (examples include study skills, organizational skills, communication skills, emotional intelligence skills, etc) or have down time, which are all important adult skills. In addition, this is time that could be used for students to learn how to do taxes, vote, use social media wisely, ethically volunteer, peer mentor, and other social skills, not to mention learning to genuinely relax.

I know that for some of us (myself included), mentorship isn't always great. But I also think it is worth it when looking at the big picture of who we are as a school. Our kids struggle with a lot of issues, including living within a system that expects them to be perfect in a very specific way, and taking the time each week to build connections does make a difference, even if we can't see it yet.

I have a long (15 years!) love/hate relationship with mentorship/advisory, and I know that signing my name to this will invalidate my opinions for some, but that's ok, I think it's really important to be able to talk about this as a group. I recognize the concerns about pay and how difficult it is to add a prep, especially for people who are teaching a variety of classes, and I really appreciate the opportunity to have this discussion, even if it is virtual.

Christy

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As much as I love my Thursday and Friday lunch breaks spent not eating lunch but desperately trying to understand and put together a coherent presentation for my mentorship students…or just read through it so I sound like I know what I am talking about -( I really want to be PAID FOR MY TIME doing it.) SLC…exhibitions etc. are already a very heavy lift.. my 10th graders consider mentorship a time to wander in late from lunch- finish their lunch or spend the 45 min lying on the floor digesting their food. Most “lessons” I deliver are ignored and then repeated later. Often times I get panicky emails from students who didn’t do anything all quarter/semester and then find out they won’t “pass mentorship”. Personally everything at Lincoln is so fast paced and so much is jammed into a day without the opportunity for a breath- students need a time to breathe, to study, to sit quietly with the lights out- they don’t need announcements and directions and “SEL” mentorship is not SEL (any “game” is met with major eye rolls and deep sighs) I am tired of reading through PowerPoint presentations- and the kids are tired of listening. Maybe I’m projecting because that is what I need in my day- a breath…a quiet moment… I would only vote for mentorship if it were a study hall or we are compensated financially AND ideally with time to prep during the day so we might still eat our lunch. We are also low on space and mentorship is squeezed in wherever it can fit- it’s not fun to run across campus and make sure another classroom is ready for mentorship class- and then to run back across campus to make sure we are there for our regular schedule classes….I have been late most days because I need to stay and answer a question or wait for a student and make sure my mentorship room is locked- I love my mentorship kids and I don’t want to give it up- but it is exhausting and I dread it each week. MENTORSHIP SHOULD NOT BE SOMETHING WE DREAD OR STRETCH TEACHERS TOO THIN! I want to love it but I just don’t. We need to stand up for ourselves and stop doing work for free that we should be compensated for. We will continue to get more piled on our plates if we keep taking it- I knew the system was broken but I didn’t realize how much it would break me- as a newer teacher I have to ask- how can we make a change if we are exhausted…why would we continue to volunteer for extra work without demanding we be compensated? It is not sustainable.

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To give some data, right now, Lincoln has the some of highest (if not the highest) rate of completion of the high school beyond plan in Naviance, which is a graduation requirement. We just completed course registration with initial completion rate being over 90%, which is truly remarkable (unbelievable to head counselors in the district, who don’t have quality mentorship programs if any at all and will be chasing down 20-30% of their population of kids over the next month) Our FAFSA completion rate is in the top 3, district wide. This is all because of the work done in Mentorship AND that’s been in both a mostly virtual environment and in a year where I am the most burned out I’ve ever been. So we have the data to show the district that  it needs to be compensated fairly and we need to demand that. Taking it away won’t diminish teacher stress about the work we do within Mentorship, because all of that stuff will still happen. Reducing it won’t either. I worry about how the lack of an advisory program in other schools has pitted counselors and teachers against each other and created animosity and just further reduced buy-in to college and career planning, SEL, and course selection. I hear the horror stories of teachers ignoring the ask to host counselors in their classrooms for lessons because of their academic time and space or even blatantly saying “absolutely not”. Schools and districts fight tooth and nail to get advisory because there’s no time in an academic day to address non-academic necessary items. It’s unfathomable to me that we need to waive this in order to show the district it’s worth (this district blows at compensating anything fairly) but it’s also a testament to the important of mentorship that we at Lincoln are setting an example for the district and we should come together to make it better. I’m committed to improving mentorship at Lincoln and to supporting my colleagues in making it better and will be voting in favor of the waiver.

Sam P

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I think the best 1-3 year plan is to keep mentorship and begin to include as many of our voices as possible to improve staff and student experience in mentorship. It seems too early in the school’s existence to give up on it, especially considering there hasn’t been a graduating class that has been in person for four years. I see things that I’d really like to change in mentorship but I also see potential. Let’s use this spring to change what we can for next year, and possibly make some long term goals if there are limits to the changes we can make this spring. I’ve felt frustrated and very overwhelmed by mentorship this year, but I don’t want to give up on it.

I also think that mentorship is a place where we can do equity work that is really meaningful. Although this waiver is unrelated to SLCs, I think mentorship is a great place for the SLCs and wanted to share the following... I realized in my SLC that one of my students was failing many of his classes. If it weren’t for the SLC I wouldn’t have been able to put a plan into action that I knew the student and his key adults were fully on board with. We were able to talk through what he needed, and what he was comfortable with. I was able to contact his counselor and all of his teachers on his behalf, I just don’t think that would’ve happened without  the SLC. I don’t advocate for my own students on that level very often (contacting teachers when a student in my Spanish class is failing another class). This student has key adults who care for him very much, but they didn’t know how to navigate the system. During the SLC I was able to build a connection with them  and get a sense for what they were comfortable with. We have a lot of parents who are really comfortable with the system, and don’t need an SLC to reach out to teachers. But we need systems that will care for all of our students and I think mentorship has  the potential to be that. Once again I have been very overwhelmed and frustrated with elements of mentorship and would really like to see some of those things changed in the coming years. I really appreciate all of the hard work that has gone into the planning of this year‘s mentorship lessons .

Emily R.

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I really liked the idea of mentorship in the beginning, but unfortunately is has turned in to an added stressor every week on top of many other things! I would be more willing to vote yes to the waiver if I knew that at least one of the days students could travel to other teachers to get help or tutoring directly from their teacher or from me! It seems as it is at the moment there is a lot of wasted time, when kids could be getting the help they need.

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How many years is the new waiver for? Could we make it for one instead of three again? Sorry if I missed that this has already been addressed.

Emily R.

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I don't want to abandon my Mentorship students. I have watched them grow in the last two years. But I do often feel rushed and confused about Mentorship expectations, because it seems like the catch-all. I appreciate what folks are saying about improving on something rather than burning it down. And switching to new things too often can be detrimental. I also recognize that the rushed and confused feeling would just intensify other class periods where these catch-all things would get dumped, similar to the frantic feelings some LA teachers had during standardized testing in the fall. I'm still thinking, and not settled on how I will vote tomorrow.

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I've never been so close to quitting, and I know that's true for other people as well. But rather than cutting mentorship, I would push for taking something else off our plates - like exhibitions, for example, or our pretty poor attempts at PBL. Plus, I'd recommend we WAY scale back what mentorship is supposed to do. A little bit more about where I'm coming from....

Confession: 90% of my mentorship is not doing the lessons, it's purely students hanging out, socializing, and resting. I never look at the slideshows until literally mentorship begins. I let my students hang out with each other and socialize for 5 minutes while I review the information (unless Christy's email has designated it's an assembly, or survey, or something else that requires being prompt). Then, I use my best judgment to decide what, if anything, we're going to do from the lesson. If it's not one of the key requirements, like Naviance for example, then all I do is share the announcements or any important info (usually under 5 minutes) and then my students play games with each other, socialize, and rest. I know that's maybe not what we are "supposed" to do in mentorship, but for the past 3 years when I talk to my students I've framed mentorship as a place for them to connect with each other and REST. Our students are shit at resting (we are too), and as some people pointed out in other posts, there is very little space in school for students to be people and not just academic robots. While approaching mentorship in this way is definitely off-roading, I know, and nobody gave me explicit permission to do this, it has also meant I have no stress associated with it, really almost no extra work (besides SLCs), have built great relationships with these students over the past 3 years, and it is consistently the only space at school where I feel joy and connection with my students because I'm not chasing after them to do academic tasks. Today one of my mentorship students came to see me after school because he found out he got into his dream school and got an amazing scholarship - the fact that he sought me out to share his news, and to feel like I'm a significant adult to him, would 10000% have not been the case if I weren't his mentorship teacher.

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If it influences anyones vote I talked to a Roosevelt teacher today and he said to his knowledge they do no form of sel. They have an optional 15 minutes period tacked on to lunch where students can get tutoring from teachers but 99% of students have an “Uber lunch”/ flex period

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A waiver-based Mentorship program supports inclusion and racial equity. 

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A waiver-based Mentorship program supports inclusion and racial equity. 

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Renewing our waiver allows for Mentorship classes to be rostered inclusively in a school where so many district- and community-driven programs* mean that students are "tracked," and some teachers would never otherwise have certain students in class. (*accelerated math & science for HCC and AL students; opt-in AP classes that skew wealthy, White, and Asian; some electives that are consistently disproportionately White-enrolled or vice versa; etc.)

As a believer in inclusion, working in a city with a racist legacy where segregated neighborhoods still mean segregated schools in 2022, and where programmatic segregation within schools is so often out of our hands, I see a waiver vote like this as a matter of conscience, and I invite you to see it that way too. It's not a cure-all, but it's a small step we can take in the right direction.  -Jonathan

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Mentorship doesn't have to be all about compliance!

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Mentorship doesn't have to be all about compliance!

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There's a little-discussed advantage to running Mentorship through a waiver: it creates latitude for us to bend the "rules" (required lessons and timelines, no "travel" between teachers, etc.) to meet our students' needs. It also gives us leverage to advocate when things become too burdensome. (Clearly there's a need for us to do more of this!)

Yes, we have heard again and again from admin and some teachers that “Mentorship lessons are required,” or “students must [X] to pass Mentorship.” (guilty 🙋‍♂️) But the fact is, your work as a Mentorship teacher is not part of your professional evaluation, and as the teacher of record it's ultimately up to you whether to pass the kid who shows up every day "needing a nap." (We all have one, right?) Most of us are using our own professional judgment and not coloring perfectly within the lines of what Mentorship is "supposed to be," and in my opinion that's a good thing.

Actual mentorship (no capital M) is a relationship—one that can only develop if it's entered into freely by both parties. Nothing poisons that relationship like an aggressive demand for compliance. If that has been your only experience of Mentorship at Lincoln, I’m sorry. You and your students deserve better.

I’m confident we’ll improve the program together and you’ll find it gets easier next year. Remember this is still a year of firsts for Lincoln.

I am also happy to share ideas with anyone who’s looking for ways to slack off make Mentorship more manageable now. There are some great suggestions among the "confessions" from our colleagues above. Slowing things down when that's what you and your students need does not make you a failure. You're doing enough.

Please vote Yes on the waiver.

-Jonathan

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I'm writing this on my phone, so apologies for it not being the most coherent!

Just wanted to chime in with a couple thoughts.

1) The frustrating parts of mentorship -- exhibition prep, registration, Naviance, frustrating SPS hoops, surveys, etc -- will not go away if we don't have mentorship. We'll just have to do them during our limited instructional minutes, throwing classes out of sync and running out of time. I'd love to revisit the idea of exhibitions/PBL as a foundational tenet of Lincoln, but that's a padlet for another day ;).

2) seconding/thirding what was said earlier about relationships: from talking to lots of you and lots of students, I know there's a huge range of experiences that people have had getting to know their students and building community within mentorship. I know that some mentorships just are not gelling or feel unhappy. I inherited a class of 2022 mentorship from a teacher who left, during virtual learning halfway through last year. They had been one of those mentorships that was pretty consistently unhappy, which was kind of true of their class in general, lots of frustration and disaffection especially that year. But the chance to be with them over time, not just last year but then going into this year, getting to connect with them through SLCs... It's been amazing, and I feel so fortunate to have a connection with those students, some of whom I would never get to connect with normally. I use SLCs as a chance to cheerlead and connect; to be honest I don't care very much about their learning goals. Being able to be that consistent adult for them, that they see every year, that cheerleads for them personally with their families, that knows what's going on for them that's tough? It's really great. I have a lot of really positive relationships with students because of my role as the librarian, but mentorship has let me connect with students in a completely different, rich way. I know it seems hard to believe that it can get better if your mentorship is feeling disconnected and unhappy, but I genuinely think it can with time.
-- Claire

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Sorry, I'm arriving late to the conversation because last week's email went to my junk mail.  My main hesitancy in voting for a waiver like this is that there hasn't been enough conversation around it (especially for those of us hired in the last couple years). Thanks for creating this space, I wish we could have started this conversation as a staff months ago.

I am generally in support of not making huge changes to our mentorship program, but not in waiving employee rights to make it happen.  If it's really a priority for the school/district, lets' make it happen within the confines of the contracts that our union has fought hard for.  Instead of breaking our backs with more students to care for, how about capping regular class size at 26 students.  I totally realize that in building/district economics this would be a stretch, but in educational economics its a win-win.  Smaller class sizes are better for students and teachers, 20 students less is a big step towards actually having the time and energy to get to know all of my students (both in regular classes and mentorship) instead of just managing them.