By Tracy Record
West Seattle Blog editor
This week, Seattle Public Schools starts a series of community meetings to talk about the concept of “well-resourced schools.”
Our area’s school board director, Leslie Harris, wishes district managers would just describe the conversation as what it’s truly about: “Closures and consolidations.”
She made that comment Saturday afternoon during one of her periodic community-conversation availabilities, at which she was joined by another member of the board, Vivian Song Maritz (whose district stretches from downtown to Ballard), in the upstairs meeting room at Southwest Library. Only four community members showed up during the course of the hour and a half Harris was there, and none were there to talk about the looming “closures and consolidations” issue. But it was threaded through the discussion anyway.
Will decisions be made before Harris leaves the board at year’s end (she chose not to run again, after two 4-year terms)? She doesn’t know. But something has to be done to deal with the district’s ~$130 million projected budget deficit – if it’s not addressed, Harris said, then the district is at risk of being taken over by the state.
She and Song Maritz said a sizable share of the blame for the budget deficit in fact lies with the state. They’re not fully funding special education. There’s some perception that last year’s contract deal for educators is the budget-busting culprit, but Song Maritz declared that’s not so: “The state is funding that,” but not the full cost of special education.
That’s what the first community member to show up at the meeting wanted to talk about – not funding so much as “what’s going well” and what policies might be “useful.” He described himself as a retired educator. The funding shortage, however, is the first thing the board members mentioned, with Harris saying the prospect of the state taking over the district “terrifies me.” She also said teachers need more tools to help prepare for and succeed in the changing educational environment – more professional development, more instructional aides – as the inclusion model takes root. They also noted that “we are losing teachers.”
Song Maritz explained the funding discrepancy, with the state capping funding at 13.5 percent of “resident … full-time enrollment,” but the district costs tending toward 15 percent. “So we have to take money from other sources to serve the kids we are obligated to serve.” That’s $400 million statewide, she said. She and Harris said that the special education gap plus the transportation funding gap equals SPS’s looming nine-digit gap – “the state is not covering the cost of getting kids to school.” And to compound the difficulties, they said, district administrators don’t provide board members with enough detailed information to facilitate “approving the budget to reallocate resources.” And, Harris added, “We can’t tell our story well in Olympia – if we’re not getting the details, legislators aren’t either.”
So now the board is faced with dealing with the deficit. Harris recalled the bitter battles in the ’00s about school closures, and observed that district administration has mostly turned over since then, so few might be prepared for the sort of bitter battles that erupted during that process (in West Seattle, that included the closure of the Cooper Elementary “program” on Pigeon Point, moving Pathfinder K-8 into that building, so its former home could be demolished and replaced by Genesee Hill Elementary, to which the former Schmitz Park Elementary was moved). “I’m not sure that the folks helping the board make decisions understand the tsunami coming their way.” But Harris and Song Maritz didn’t dispute that closures/consolidations are unavoidable – “it’s not fair to students in underenrolled schools not to have the entire continuum of resources.” However, there will be domino effects, such as “when you close and consolidate schools, you have to redraw boundaries.” Harris observed that they’ll need to be mindful of “unintended consequences.”
The third and fourth people to show up at Saturday’s meeting were a mother and daughter who had attended one of Harris’s community chats earlier in the year to talk to her about their attempts to get a water-polo program going at West Seattle High School. They described their efforts as “in a holding pattern” as they deal with district administrators. In the meantime, the student has signed up for WSHS’s swim team, while they keep working on trying to get water polo added as a “club” sport. Song Maritz noted that the school board has three student members, one of whom is from WSHS, so that would be a good person to talk with.
The conversation turned back to the state of the district, looking toward this week’s meetings (the one for West Seattle and South Park is set for 6 pm Thursday, August 10th, at Madison Middle School). The district needs to do better research on enrollment trends such as why families are leaving, Song Maritz observed – she thinks a major factor is families moving out of Seattle – largely because of housing costs – not just families moving into independent or parochial schools. Pierce County, for example, is gaining enrollment.
As the meeting ebbed to a close – Song Maritz had to leave about an hour in, to be with her family – Harris vowed that she would stay involved even beyond the end of her term at the end of the year, so whether or not the school closure/consolidation decisions are made before she “leaves,” her advocacy will continue.
P.S. If you can’t get to the Thursday meeting at Madison MS (3429 45th SW), an all-district online meeting is planned August 29th.
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