When Seattle Public Schools announced the date for Thursday night’s West Seattle meeting on their “interim capacity-management plan” – the next round of proposals for solving school overcrowding (see them here) – local families pointed out that conflicted with several local schools’ open houses, curriculum nights, and other special events. Too late to reschedule, apparently – though district official Tom Redman said these meetings were set up in August (the dates weren’t publicly announced till a few weeks ago) – but in case you wanted to be there and couldn’t, we recorded it all on video, and that’s what you will see above.
As for the highlights of what happened: Opening the meeting at Madison Middle School, assistant superintendent for operations Pegi McEvoy described the presentation as a “draft” plan likely to undergo changes in an “iterative” process. Other staff members said that West Seattle has the most growth anticipated in elementary-student population over the next 4 years, which their plan is meant to address … a plan that comes just two years after a school (Genesee Hill) was closed.
The district’s suggestion of adding room for more than 1,000 kids by reopening Boren (5950 Delridge) next year and possibly Hughes (7740 34th SW) later – reported here on Thursday morning – was unpopular with meeting attendees from north West Seattle.
Residents of that area noted that their side of the peninsula has the most-jampacked elementaries (Lafayette and Schmitz Park), but the two schools mentioned for reopening are both on the south side of the peninsula. Regarding the fact that Hughes is currently leased to independent Westside School (WSB sponsor), reopening it as an SPS school was described repeatedly as a “last resort” – but also described as potentially giving the district “the most bang for (its) buck.” McEvoy mentioned a meeting set for Monday with Westside administrators.
Opening Boren, for starters, was described as an “interim” move to tide the district over to new construction from the anticipated February 2013 BEX 4 levy – potentially 2 new elementaries in West Seattle. (Locations weren’t mentioned, but the district has long said a new elementary was likely in the future at the site where the old Denny International Middle School building has just been torn down.) District officials said they’re awaiting brand-new enrollment numbers to check their projections.
If Boren is opened in fall 2012 – and the district officials seemed set on it, with one saying that if the board approves it in November, design work will begin “the next day” – who will go there? That isn’t settled yet, said McEvoy – they need to decide whether it would become an option school (language immersion, for example), or whether it would become an attendance-area school so that boundaries would be redrawn, or something else. One attendee suggested making it an attendance-area school made more sense, even though that would mean new boundaries, less than two years after boundaries were redrawn, causing people to “pull their hair out.”
Officials said that Genesee Hill and Fairmount Park elementaries would need more improvements than Boren, to be ready for reopening in fall of next year, with both having lost their occupancy permits since they’ve been empty more than two years – so their only options for next year, they feel, is open Boren or add portables. “Boren is in pretty good condition,” they insisted.
Three School Board members – Steve Sundquist, Sherry Carr, and Peter Maier – were at the meeting, introduced toward the start; Sundquist said he wanted to be “in touch with the community’s reactions” to the proposal. Their vote on the first year of “capacity management” is scheduled for next month; a timetable shown during the meeting included plan tweaking from October 20th-November 1st, and then a plan to be introduced to the board on November 2nd, with a vote two weeks later. Then in December, design work would begin for anything necessary to reopen schools that the board signs off on reopening.
| 34 COMMENTS