One day after Chief Sealth International High School staff, students, and parents filled the Seattle School Board chambers to make impassioned pleas, they have followed up with a letter and petition. This, you might recall, all started with new enrollment projections leading to a last-minute order that Sealth cut three more full-time teaching positions in the final days of the school year. A point made repeatedly in testimony to the board last night was that the school had made it through a difficult budgeting process before this, with cuts already made, only to be told now they had to make more. The letter:

To: Seattle School Board Members: Stephan Blanford, Rick Burke​, Jill Geary, Scott Pinkham, Betty Patu, Leslie Harris, and Sue Peters
Associate Superintendent Michael Tolley
Associate Superintendent of Facilities and Enrollment Flip Herndon
Deputy Superintendent Steven Nielsen

Last night, you heard from the staff, students, and stakeholders at Chief Sealth International High School about the impact of losing an additional 3.0 FTE from our budget for the 2016/17 school year after a long and difficult spring budget process that included deep losses and cuts of staff.

These additional displacements deeply affect our school’s ability to offer the stable teaching core necessary to run a school which serves so many specialized populations. Our school cannot absorb or buy back staff. We do not have deep-pocketed PTSA dollars or grant dollars or other funding streams that other schools might use to offset such cuts. These shifts in FTE will cut deeply into the arts and CTE and have a significant impact on core academic programs for students. These programs allow us to close the opportunity gap for our students by providing IB for all and by creating programming that is working to affect real change for all of our students, including our disproportionately high specialized populations. These changes in enrollment will jeopardize these successful programs.

We as a staff would like to propose these solutions for the 2016/17 budget cycle. Here are our recommendations:

· Grant our mitigation requests for an IB coordinator and our immersion classes from the first round of difficult budget requests.

· Hold Chief Sealth harmless from these FTE changes for one year until the permanent West Seattle boundary decisions are finalized at the district level this fall.

· Re-evaluate our budget AFTER the District counts, which will include the nonresident and transfer students to Sealth, international students, and waitlisted students whose placements have not yet been finalized.

· Fund advanced learning in the WSS at Sealth, Ingraham, and Rainier Beach beginning in the fall of 2016/17.

Sincerely,
Staff from Chief Sealth International High School

They are gathering signatures of support via this online petition including the letter.

Thanks to proud mom Stephanie Gerding for sharing the report, photo, and video about the first Girl Scouts to lead a flag ceremony at Schmitz Park Elementary:

After watching years of assemblies with boys serving Color Guard for the flags, 3rd grader Madeline Gerding from Girl Scout Troop 44428 here in West Seattle wrote a letter to principal Gerrit Kischner reminding him that Girl Scouts are just as responsible as Boy Scouts and could present the colors at assemblies too. Mr. Kischner wholeheartedly agreed and asked the Schmitz Park students from Madeline’s Troop and from Troop 44253 to be Color Guard at the end-of-year assembly today. It was extra exciting since it’s the last assembly at that site before moving on to Genesee Hill this fall!

Yay for all the educators that support these kids and encourage their voices!

4:51 PM: We’re at Seattle Public Schools headquarters in SODO, where the last-week-of-school order for Chief Sealth International High School to cut three full-time teaching positions has brought a big turnout to the School Board‘s budget public hearing. What was supposed to be a 15-minute hearing has already stretched beyond that, with a roomful of people, including teachers and students. Teachers who have spoken so far have talked about the inequity of the cuts and also about the cuts going counter to the district’s goals. “The death by a thousand cuts will come,” declared teacher Jason Glover. “If these cuts are maintained, we will be forced to cut programs.” One of the speakers before him, Sealth teacher Paul Fischburg, said these cuts followed many others:

4:58 PM: Social-studies teacher Noah Zeichner is asking about district policies and boundaries and whether they are “decimating” the school and leading to socioeconomic disparity between the two public high schools in West Seattle. He says that the school was closed to international exchange students this past year, and that they should be allowed to wait and see if enrollment gains over the summer, including those types of students, might make up some of the newly reported shortfall (explained in our story from last night).

5:07 PM: The budget hearing continues, and it of course is about more than the Sealth cuts and other teacher staffing. The board has just heard from longtime district watchdog Chris Jackins, who mentioned a few West Seattle items – including the fact that the original Schmitz Park Elementary building is being closed without “a school closure process,” a point that has also been raised by Vicki Schmitz Block, a member of the family that donated the land for the school on the grounds that it remain a school. He also asked the board not to close Roxhill Elementary, which is not explicitly spelled out in the upcoming budget but is implied because of money included for renovating EC Hughes Elementary, ostensibly to become the new home of the program currently at Roxhill.

5:10 PM: A speaker identifying himself as a Schmitz Park Elementary parent has now both mentioned a plan brewing to use part of its space for child care, while also urging a security plan for the many portables on its site, and expressing concern that they, as well as the building and its equipment, will fall into disrepair. He says he’s frustrated that there does not appear to be a plan. He is followed by three Chief Sealth students who say the courses that might be cut as a result of budget cuts are important to their educational goals.

Another student shortly afterward says that cuts are harming the IB program at CSIHS: “Many people at Chief Sealth want to learn, just like any other person going to school.” The next speaker, special-education teacher Joe Schultz, said he is speaking for students who couldn’t be here – migrants, special-ed, students of color, “an incredibly diverse school that has incredibly diverse needs.” The cuts “will crush programs … it will devastate my students, who love the wood-shop program … which already has gone down to .6 [of a teacher]. I urge you to look at the money that’s available .. and help us save our programs.”

5:27 PM: The hearing is still going after an hour. Parent Lynn Ogdon-Perrine is speaking about the needs of the school – its students, its teachers. She has been a very involved volunteer. She says Sealth made it through a very difficult budgeting process – and now, with days left in the year, it’s “unconscionable” that they will have to deal with further cuts, especially losing teachers.

5:29 PM: We mentioned Vicki Schmitz Block earlier; now she is at the podium, speaking about the family’s origins, as immigrants who cared about education. She says Schmitz Park School is missing in the budget book – “it suddenly doesn’t exist, it has just disappeared. … At a minimum, the district needs to amend the budget” to add custodial/maintenance funds. “Disappearing Schmitz Park Elementary really means closing it, and that’s not acceptable.”

5:34 PM: Back to Sealth, another student is now speaking: “I look around this room and I see all these brilliant and amazing people that have supported me and my fellow students … it just breaks my heart hearing that three of these people have to leave or become part-time students … I can’t let that happen. … I can’t believe that Seattle Public Schools wants to take three of these people away. … They dedicate their lives to help students like me.” She says that one of the teachers whose classes she had on her schedule next year has learned she’ll be cut. … Another student says that she had been a student at Pathfinder and recalled having to join in the fight to keep the school from being closed, expressing disbelief that in this district, so many such fights were needed. … She’s followed by a teacher and parent who says she also is in disbelief. (Added) As much as anger and emotion, disappointment was voiced by teacher Julie Brown, who said she has learned her position will be cut:

5:51 PM: Principal Aida Fraser-Hammer is now speaking.

“Finding out about cuts at the last minute does not promote consistency. … Our students deserve to know that they can have the consistency. I know that we run by the numbers, but we hire human beings.” She asks them to take another look and see what can be done to prevent the cuts. And that ends the public hearing, more than an hour beyond the 15 minutes that it was originally scheduled to last. The board is scheduled to vote on the budget at a meeting in July.

ADDED FRIDAY AFTERNOON: We’ve learned an online petition has been launched; we’ll be working on a separate followup for later tonight.