Madness to their Method? – by Sue Peters
Originally published at http://eatthestate.org/13-10/Madnesstotheir.htm
The day before the Thanksgiving break, my son came home with a letter from his school. It announced that the school district was going to close his school, cut his program in half and move it to two other schools, and scatter the school’s special ed kids across the district.
Turns out we were just one of hundreds of Seattle families tossed this bit of gristle from the school district on the eve of the holidays. The new School Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson’s “Preliminary Proposal” to solve the district’s latest budget crisis consisted of closing seven buildings, moving or dissolving 14 programs, and shuffling around as many as 4,000 kids, all in the name of “capacity management” and “Excellence for All,” to save just $3.6 million from a $24-37 million shortfall.
“Excellence for All” looked more like “Pain for Many.” And upon closer look it didn’t make much sense at all.
We were given just six weeks during the holidays to respond to this plan, and plead with our seven-member elected school board for better solutions, before the superintendent issued her “Final Recommendations” on Jan. 6. Many parents were out of town (or snowed in), so this short timeline during major holidays limited public input.
Still, parents and PTAs across the district tried hard to understand the superintendent’s logic and came up with counterproposals. We regaled the school board with our ideas (the blogs are full of some excellent ones) and showed up at endless meetings. Meanwhile, the superintendent issued two more variations, about a week after the first and another on Dec. 9, reshuffling the deck again.
Rationale changed from proposal to proposal. Some schools on the chopping block in the first round (Arbor Heights, Lowell) were taken off in the second, and others added (Montlake, Cooper). Buildings deemed unfit in one proposal were okay in the next. New “solutions” to overcrowding in a school made the building as full as it was before.
The plans disproportionately affected “alternative and nontraditional” schools and programs (Nova, Summit, African American Academy, Accelerated Progress Program, Pathfinder, the Secondary Bilingual program), and children of color (T.T. Minor, Cooper, Thurgood Marshall, African American Academy).
And some parts of the plans were just plain illogical–like moving arts-oriented Center School from the theater district of Seattle Center down to Rainier Beach, or evicting the district’s most medically fragile special ed kids from their specially equipped building and distribute them throughout the district. (Both ideas were later shelved.)
After spending many hours trying to find a logical guiding principle behind the proposals, many of us determined there was none. One parent compared the process to the Hokey Pokey–”You put one school in, you take one school out, you put one school in and shake it all about.”
At one school board meeting, 7th grader Adam Ellner poignantly compared this shuffling of schools to a sad line of dominoes where “the dominoes at the end have no choice but to fall down.”
And that has been the most distasteful element of this process–it has pitted schools against each other. At the school district-sponsored workshops at the John Stanford Center they handed out spreadsheets showing all the schools’ capacity, building status and other data and invited members of the community to come up with better solutions. Naturally the first panicked results were, “Don’t close us–close THEM instead!”
Thankfully, many in the public school community have decided they won’t play that divisive game any more. So two Seattle Public School teachers, Vicky Jambor and Jesse Hagopian formed ESP Vision: Educators, Students, and Parents for a Better Vision of Seattle Schools. “We are attempting to unite all the schools together in one powerful coalition to oppose the school closures,” says Hagopian, whose mother is a former school board member. “We are planning to hold a mass rally to put pressure on the district to stand up to the state to demand the funding they are legally owed through the Basic Education Act of 1977 so we don’t have to close schools.”
It is pretty shocking to live in one of the most literate and affluent cities in the nation, and have our local schools constantly under threat of under-funding. It is shameful to live in the home state of Boeing, Microsoft and Amazon and rank 45th in the nation for per-student funding.
The first ESP meeting at the Garfield Community Center on Dec. 29 attracted about 25 parents, teachers, and a bus driver, representing various schools–T.T. Minor, the African American Academy, Nova, Lowell, and the Central district as a whole.
Out of this came an online petition, “Save Seattle Schools,” that says the superintendent’s proposals are flawed, will not accomplish what the district says they will, lack data, and need to be redone before any of us can get behind them. In two days over 600 people signed it from 28 different schools district-wide. It currently has over 1400 signatures. (To add yours, visit http://www.petitiononline.com/espvsn/petition.html.) ESP presented it to the superintendent and board at the Jan. 7 board meeting. Suddenly this divisive process was uniting people.
Parent and ESP member Meg Diaz analyzed the district’s data and created an impressive PowerPoint presentation that demonstrates that any cost savings will be offset by the costs of moving kids, program replication and attrition. After the 2006 school closures, 20.7 percent of kids from the affected schools left the district, taking their state money with them (http://andrehelmstetter.com/pafp/preliminary_analysis_final_proposal.htm).
ESP presented Diaz’s findings at its Jan. 8 press conference at the University Heights Community Center (a former school that the district closed years ago and could now sorely use to ease north-end crowding). A march and rally is planned for 2 p.m. Jan. 25 from TT Minor Elementary (E. Union St. and 17th Avenue) to Nova School, followed by a rally at the Garfield Community Center. (For more info, visit http://soseattle.blogspot.com/.)
In her Jan. 6 final recommendations, the superintendent proposed closing five buildings, discontinuing or moving 13 programs and creating one new one. On Jan. 29 the school board will vote on this plan. They can vote for some, all or none of it, and add alternative solutions.
ESP Vision aims to remind the board that moving kids around and replicating programs costs money, and constant upheaval costs confidence in the district. Rather than take the short-term questionable fix of shuttering buildings and shuffling kids around, ESP feels the district should save money elsewhere and market the schools to win back those who are currently sending their kids to private school. (Seattle has one of the highest private school enrollment rates in the nation.) It should demand that the state fulfill its mandate to fund the schools, and consider cutting back from administrative costs at the central district office, which saw a 10 percent increase in expenditures last year.
The district should also look ahead and consider the demographic predictions for the city. If a large influx of new Seattleites is expected to fill all those Belltown condos and townhouses, why close schools–especially in the central part of town–that their kids will need?
As a grand monument to such short-sighted thinking stands the Queen Anne High School, now home to swank condos on prime real estate on Q.A.’s south slope. The 1909 Beaux Arts building was closed by the district due to low enrollment in 1981, and sold to a developer in 1986. It was converted to apartments and sold again in 2005 for almost $25.3 million. Today the district has no high school in the booming QA/Magnolia neighborhoods. Meanwhile, the new condos in the building have sold for as much as $1 million each. But the kids are out of luck. Sue Peters is an SPS parent and member of ESP Vision.
Madness to their Method?
Madness to their Method? – by Sue Peters
Originally published at http://eatthestate.org/13-10/Madnesstotheir.htm
The day before the Thanksgiving break, my son came home with a letter from his school. It announced that the school district was going to close his school, cut his program in half and move it to two other schools, and scatter the school’s special ed kids across the district.
Turns out we were just one of hundreds of Seattle families tossed this bit of gristle from the school district on the eve of the holidays. The new School Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson’s “Preliminary Proposal” to solve the district’s latest budget crisis consisted of closing seven buildings, moving or dissolving 14 programs, and shuffling around as many as 4,000 kids, all in the name of “capacity management” and “Excellence for All,” to save just $3.6 million from a $24-37 million shortfall.
“Excellence for All” looked more like “Pain for Many.” And upon closer look it didn’t make much sense at all.
We were given just six weeks during the holidays to respond to this plan, and plead with our seven-member elected school board for better solutions, before the superintendent issued her “Final Recommendations” on Jan. 6. Many parents were out of town (or snowed in), so this short timeline during major holidays limited public input.
Still, parents and PTAs across the district tried hard to understand the superintendent’s logic and came up with counterproposals. We regaled the school board with our ideas (the blogs are full of some excellent ones) and showed up at endless meetings. Meanwhile, the superintendent issued two more variations, about a week after the first and another on Dec. 9, reshuffling the deck again.
Rationale changed from proposal to proposal. Some schools on the chopping block in the first round (Arbor Heights, Lowell) were taken off in the second, and others added (Montlake, Cooper). Buildings deemed unfit in one proposal were okay in the next. New “solutions” to overcrowding in a school made the building as full as it was before.
The plans disproportionately affected “alternative and nontraditional” schools and programs (Nova, Summit, African American Academy, Accelerated Progress Program, Pathfinder, the Secondary Bilingual program), and children of color (T.T. Minor, Cooper, Thurgood Marshall, African American Academy).
And some parts of the plans were just plain illogical–like moving arts-oriented Center School from the theater district of Seattle Center down to Rainier Beach, or evicting the district’s most medically fragile special ed kids from their specially equipped building and distribute them throughout the district. (Both ideas were later shelved.)
After spending many hours trying to find a logical guiding principle behind the proposals, many of us determined there was none. One parent compared the process to the Hokey Pokey–”You put one school in, you take one school out, you put one school in and shake it all about.”
At one school board meeting, 7th grader Adam Ellner poignantly compared this shuffling of schools to a sad line of dominoes where “the dominoes at the end have no choice but to fall down.”
And that has been the most distasteful element of this process–it has pitted schools against each other. At the school district-sponsored workshops at the John Stanford Center they handed out spreadsheets showing all the schools’ capacity, building status and other data and invited members of the community to come up with better solutions. Naturally the first panicked results were, “Don’t close us–close THEM instead!”
Thankfully, many in the public school community have decided they won’t play that divisive game any more. So two Seattle Public School teachers, Vicky Jambor and Jesse Hagopian formed ESP Vision: Educators, Students, and Parents for a Better Vision of Seattle Schools. “We are attempting to unite all the schools together in one powerful coalition to oppose the school closures,” says Hagopian, whose mother is a former school board member. “We are planning to hold a mass rally to put pressure on the district to stand up to the state to demand the funding they are legally owed through the Basic Education Act of 1977 so we don’t have to close schools.”
It is pretty shocking to live in one of the most literate and affluent cities in the nation, and have our local schools constantly under threat of under-funding. It is shameful to live in the home state of Boeing, Microsoft and Amazon and rank 45th in the nation for per-student funding.
The first ESP meeting at the Garfield Community Center on Dec. 29 attracted about 25 parents, teachers, and a bus driver, representing various schools–T.T. Minor, the African American Academy, Nova, Lowell, and the Central district as a whole.
Out of this came an online petition, “Save Seattle Schools,” that says the superintendent’s proposals are flawed, will not accomplish what the district says they will, lack data, and need to be redone before any of us can get behind them. In two days over 600 people signed it from 28 different schools district-wide. It currently has over 1400 signatures. (To add yours, visit http://www.petitiononline.com/espvsn/petition.html.) ESP presented it to the superintendent and board at the Jan. 7 board meeting. Suddenly this divisive process was uniting people.
Parent and ESP member Meg Diaz analyzed the district’s data and created an impressive PowerPoint presentation that demonstrates that any cost savings will be offset by the costs of moving kids, program replication and attrition. After the 2006 school closures, 20.7 percent of kids from the affected schools left the district, taking their state money with them (http://andrehelmstetter.com/pafp/preliminary_analysis_final_proposal.htm).
ESP presented Diaz’s findings at its Jan. 8 press conference at the University Heights Community Center (a former school that the district closed years ago and could now sorely use to ease north-end crowding). A march and rally is planned for 2 p.m. Jan. 25 from TT Minor Elementary (E. Union St. and 17th Avenue) to Nova School, followed by a rally at the Garfield Community Center. (For more info, visit http://soseattle.blogspot.com/.)
In her Jan. 6 final recommendations, the superintendent proposed closing five buildings, discontinuing or moving 13 programs and creating one new one. On Jan. 29 the school board will vote on this plan. They can vote for some, all or none of it, and add alternative solutions.
ESP Vision aims to remind the board that moving kids around and replicating programs costs money, and constant upheaval costs confidence in the district. Rather than take the short-term questionable fix of shuttering buildings and shuffling kids around, ESP feels the district should save money elsewhere and market the schools to win back those who are currently sending their kids to private school. (Seattle has one of the highest private school enrollment rates in the nation.) It should demand that the state fulfill its mandate to fund the schools, and consider cutting back from administrative costs at the central district office, which saw a 10 percent increase in expenditures last year.
The district should also look ahead and consider the demographic predictions for the city. If a large influx of new Seattleites is expected to fill all those Belltown condos and townhouses, why close schools–especially in the central part of town–that their kids will need?
As a grand monument to such short-sighted thinking stands the Queen Anne High School, now home to swank condos on prime real estate on Q.A.’s south slope. The 1909 Beaux Arts building was closed by the district due to low enrollment in 1981, and sold to a developer in 1986. It was converted to apartments and sold again in 2005 for almost $25.3 million. Today the district has no high school in the booming QA/Magnolia neighborhoods. Meanwhile, the new condos in the building have sold for as much as $1 million each. But the kids are out of luck. Sue Peters is an SPS parent and member of ESP Vision.
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