The early agenda for the Seattle Public Schools Board of Directors‘ November 15 meeting is online. This meeting will attract more attention than most meetings, because SPS Superintendent Dr. Brent Jones is scheduled to unveil his plan for dealing with a budget crunch by transforming the district into “a system of well-resourced schools.” That is expected to include a proposal to close and consolidate some schools.
Four school-board seats are on the citywide ballot for Tuesday’s election, so the eventual fate of the plan could be decided by a majority-new board. One of the two board members who aren’t running for re-election is our area’s representative, Leslie Harris, finishing her second term, staying involved until the end (and, she promises, beyond). Weekend before last, she held her final pre-election community-conversation meeting. The anticipated battle over likely closure proposals was on many minds, including Harris’s.
She admitted it feels “bizarre” to realize she won’t be among those making the decision. But before she steps down, she has a truckload of questions she suspects won’t be answered when the proposal is first presented – such as what the cost will be for securing buildings and for eventually reopening them, and is it true that charter schools would get dibs on renting a mouthballed school building? She also recapped some of the issues she had raised at a budget “work session” two days before her community meeting, such as a lack of “guiding principles” for the decisionmaking.
“I think that some consolidation needs to happen,” Harris says “But again, I want to know, what’s our guiding principle?” She’s still concerned that there hasn’t been enough discussion and recalls that the last round of closures in the late ’00s was unnecessarily ugly.
Her principles, she said, would include looking at what demographics would result from whatever’s proposed – the district no longer has a demographer, she noted. What would the transportation costs be? How much money would really be saved? How would the vision fit with the city’s forthcoming comprehensive-plan changes? How do specific communities – such as multilingual students – fit in? How will the next consultant report on schools’ physical conditions play into it? How will other key parts of the process be pursued – such as boundary-redrawing and “significant legal considerations/processes”?
She voiced worry about the future of the smallest schools, given the widespread assumption that “well-resourced” will be synonymous with “big.” One example she cited was Puget Ridge’s Sanislo Elementary. “Their staff is rockin’,” she declared, while noting it’s in a challenging spot “between two option schools.”
Harris sees communication as the district’s biggest problems. One attendee, local educator/advocate Manuela Slye, observed that it’s particularly problematic for some of the Seattle’s communities of color – the Latino community in particular, she said, “feels disenfranchised” and needs empathy from Harris and other school-board reps. Another attendee wondered what kind of outreach happened; Harris recalled that the “well-resourced school” community discussions that eventually happened in August were supposed to be two months earlier. While interpreters were offered, she wondered if various communities truly felt comfortable enough to come participate at the meetings. A discussion ensued about the value of convening meetings on communities’ own turf.
At the heart of all that’s about to unfold is a big budget gap to close. Some of the attendees at Harris’s gathering were special-education advocates/parents who said the district has to address the fact that “families are not getting ervices they’re entitled to.” Harris said she and boardmate Vivian Song have been “asking for a year” for a breakdown on SPS special-education funding, but haven’t received it. She also lamented the board’s operational change to take away committees, which is where she said some problems could have been aired and addressed before reaching centerstage with the full board. But issues remain to be worked on, “and my time is up.”
She hopes to be a resource for people in her post-board life, rather than being at the microphone on the public-comment side at board meetings. In the meantime, she expects to have one more community-conversation meeting, with whomever wins the race to succeed her (either Gina Topp or Maryanne Wood), after that much-awaited plan is released – so watch for word of that.
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