WSS Data Compiled by Meg Diaz

Here's a new spreadsheet from Meg Diaz with the WSS data for almost every school in the district for 2008-09, 2009-10 and 2010-11. We can each draw our own conclusions.

Meg notes that one of biggest hindrances for reviewing the district's data is that anyone wanting to analyze it has to first be willing to sit down and do tedious line by line data entry. It's incredibly tedious, and is a considerable barrier.

I have done some of it myself and I know exactly what she's talking about.

Meg wanted to know what the community makes of this data.

Comments

Charlie Mas said…
The numbers for NOVA don't look like they could possibly be right. They show a 70% drop in FTE between 09/10 and 10/11 but a tenfold increase in total budget. I think these must be typos.

Also, the budget cuts for Eckstein, Madrona, Leschi, Thurgood Marshall, Northgate, Hamilton, Salmon Bay, Kimball, Muir, Beacon Hill, Concord, Roxhill, and Wing Luke are so extreme that I wonder if they could possibly be right.
Stu said…
Meg wanted to know what the community makes of this data

I think it shows that Meg Diaz knows and cares more about what's happening in this administration than anyone who actually works there.

One can only imagine the kind of district we'd have if ANY staff person spent this much time on the details.

stu
seattle citizen said…
So the question is, do the numbers all add up? There are schools that lose students (more in north end) and schools that gain (more in south) Does the net loss or gain match projected total enrollment for 2010-2011?

(I wish the state would get its act together and vote on the freakin' ed budget already...this uncertainty in funding is causing massive havoc in individual schools all around the state.)
kellie said…
So with all the crowding issues in the NE, the numbers at Eckstein are going down? This just does not seems plausible. I guess the most interesting numbers will be the ones they release after open enrollment.
seattle citizen said…
I retract my statement that north seems to suffer more loss than south. Looking at the spreadsheet, it appears that it's all over the place, gain here, loss there.
ARB said…
love to see % nonwhite and NCLB status for more info, but great chart! Thanks.
Meg said…
Eckstein is a typo (I hope) on the WSS sheet. I'm sure that I made some typos in there, too, though (there are a number of instances where the WSS says the FTE is .2 more than it adds to, or the dollar amount is +/- $10 from total. In $100k, I don't find the $10 worrying. One person's time one day a week is more concerning).

It looks to me as if Nova is getting their allocation in the form of cold hard cash. Which... okay, as long as it's enough money.

Overall, it looks as if enrollment is projected to increase. I haven't looked at it by cluster or the 10-year enrollment trajectory by clusters or schools.

A couple of the schools in the top 10 of projected increases are West Seattle Elementary, Rainier Beach, Hawthorne, and Aki. A couple with the largest projected decreases: West Seattle High School, Ballard, Roosevelt, Laurelhurst. There are a couple of outliers in the increases that make more sense. I have an opinion as to why (on weird increases, decreases and possible explanations), but I'm curious to see what other people's conclusions are.

Title schools, in almost every case, are getting significantly less Title money - I expect this is for performance management "intervention." But why the already large amount of centrally held title money, then?

LAP money allocation increased, overall, which is good, since for 2009-10, just over 60% of LAP monies were held back.

I found some of the weirdness in the numbers made more sense to me when I looked at the difference between this year's current enrollment (pulled from October counts) and the 2010-11 projected enrollment, and stacked it so I could look at the difference lowest to highest.

Aurora- NCLB status can be found on a spreadsheet on OSPI.
zb said…
I think the NCLB info is there, under "enrollment" as "is school in improvement as of fall 2009?"

I'm confused by "total dollars" by school (i.e. $105,000 for View Ridge, as an example). I'm guessing this is some other number than the "total dollars" (i.e. total dollars from some set of sources, not including the enrollment tied numbers?). I'm also confused by the sheets corresponding to "Title I LAP money".

But, wonderful job -- I've been considering trying to collate this info myself (and would not have done nearly as wonderful a job of it), and I'm so pleased to have it available.
zb said…
And, although I'd consider adding the % nonwhite number, I think that racial demographics in Seattle are complicated enough that I find the FRL numbers (which are included in the enrollment sheet) more useful for my thinking about the budgets.
seattle citizen said…
F/RL figures are probably more helpful as tehy correlate a little more tightly to "readiness" or "enrichment" etc, but keep in mind that as someone (you, zb?) said, some parents/students don't apply for F/RL
Right, the F/RL numbers drop off a lot in middle and in high school and that's a point not to be forgotten.

Meg was under the weather when she created this so there may be typos.
Oh, it should be said, thank you Meg.
seattle citizen said…
I wonder if there were some way, as suggested elsewhere, to average our enrollment over, say, ten years and just supply a school that average amount every year. All these flucuating budgets, worry about re-staffing if money is added back in....It's not good for schools or students.
People complain about displaced staff having access to other programs, rather than being somehow shuffled off, but keep in mind that it is not the teacher's fault if programs are so variable year to year. There is, I bet, a five percent shuffling of staff EVERY year, and this, over ten years, means lots of staff in transition over the course of a decade.
Sue said…
Well, if one were say, suspicious of the district, one might say that the reason Ballard, West Seattle, Roosevelt and Laurelhurst's projected enrollment went down is because the district is artificially decreasing enrollment at those schools. They are wrongfully capping it at those schools, so that they can (theoretically) force people who would have traditionally gone to those schools into enrolling in schools that they might not have traditionally enrolled in, like Ingraham and Hale, etc.

It is like Cleveland - they are aiming for instant school improvement by forcefully shifting populations around.

Let's see how well that works, eh? I know that the private high school applications jumped a lot this year, so that people could avoid the consequences of the district's actions. Meanwhile, those high schools are losing staff and dollars that they desperately need, just so the district can play God.
Patrick said…
Interesting tables! Thanks for the work.

Jane Addams has only one principal. At one point before it opened they talked about having two, but by the time it opened there was only one.

Why are there no % FRL for Jane Addams?
ParentofThree said…
Off topic, but Randy Dorn had some trouble with the police Sat night, could be charged with a DUI this week. Parents calling for his resignation.

Not what we need at the moemnt.
Anonymous said…
Thank you Keepin'on for pointing out what is happening. Yes! They are closing the doors to those four schools to force kids to go to places like Ingraham and Rainier Beach. So kids who WANT to go to those schools CAN'T. How fair is that?!?!? I know because I work at one of the schools.
Shannon said…
It seems strange that all the popular high schools have downward projections while the unpopular ones are going up. Is that the smell of hope in the air or is it indeed a strategy due to capping capacity at those locations?

I suppose they may theorize that in order to allow all neighborhood students to enroll in subsequent years they have to have a bit of capacity now. Would that be a reasonable excuse?

I guess I had expected that there would be a larger incoming class to schools like Roosevelt when all those in our neighborhood could now get in.
Meg said…
Patrick - I went by the WSS allocation for the staffing, and for 2009-10, Jane Addams is listed w/ 2 principals. I don't have FRL % for Jane Addams because I pulled FRL and current enrollment numbers from the annual reports (which use the October enrollment count), and Jane Addams won't have an annual report until fall.

Until zb pointed out that the column is still there, I completely forgot that I started a column about NCLB status, and since I populated the sheet, I can tell you that the data in that column shouldn't be relied upon. I looked over the district's AYP letter, punched in a binary 1-0 based on that, looked at OSPI and the data there is much more robust, but I haven't chugged through OSPI's stuff. The yes-no on NCLB reflects only those schools that families were given a choice to opt out of - it's poorly examined. I can't advise using that column to assist in any kind of analysis.

zb- Total dollars is the sum of all cash allocations for any given school: Title, LAP, copier money, SpEd supplies, blingual textual materials, per student allocations - everything with a dollar sign on a WSS sheet.

I might be able to explain the sheets on title and LAP money... but it would help to know what's confusing to you about it.
Eric B said…
All I can say is THANK YOU MEG!! To have these numbers all together in one place really helps.
dan dempsey said…
Fabulous Meg,

Thanks so much. I can hardly wait for the ROI

Return on investment for test score improvement based on spending.

Of course first we much calculate the ROS ..... the return on Shuffling

That is what this is all about right!!! Shuffle the students about to raise the test scores at lower performing schools. The district figured out they do not know much about educating effectively with the MGJ top down power trip.

So draw tiny areas around top performing schools to raise scores elsewhere as students must go there.
reader said…
I vote that the discussion on WSS be broadened to include students with disabilities. Meg what statistics could you bring forward on that. Thank you.
dan dempsey said…
reader... great idea.

The official office of information exactly what we need.

It is becoming very clear there are a lot of things needed that the district does not provide.

But can Super Woman MEG do it all?

Damn... I hope so.
Or can she delegate tasks to us?
ARB said…
Re: disabled students in SPS
----
Ann Dornfeld's NPR story on SPS Special Ed airs 3/24 during Morning Edition (probably 6:40 am) and The Conversation (beginning at noon), as well as probably on KUOW Presents in the evening. It'll also be online - transcript and audio.
---
I heard the 6:40am broadcast. Largely critical and fairly long spot for radio. Worth trying to catch.
zb said…
"I might be able to explain the sheets on title and LAP money... but it would help to know what's confusing to you about it."

Hi Meg:

I'm confused 'cause when I look at these sheets,
# Non-Title Non-LAP Money
# Title & LAP Money

only data for Meany is listed, and only for the SBOC program. I guess I expected to see each school, with a listing of their LAP & Title I funds, like in the individual sheets for each school (downloadable at SPS).
zb said…
"Total dollars is the sum of all cash allocations for any given school: Title, LAP, copier money, SpEd supplies, bilingual textual materials, per student allocations - everything with a dollar sign on a WSS sheet."

Thanks. So what's not there, to understand the actual budget is the funds for each allocated staff member, which in turn, would depend on the seniority & role of the individual staff members at the school.

baling
THANK YOU MEG,

In addition to Dan Dempsey's recommendation about delegating this - how did you become able to do this?

Whom did you have to ask, to find the data?

How did you find what data and resources were already available so that you could pull all of this together?

What data are public, vs. what has been released only internally?

I, too, would like to look at 'official' data, but am surprised how spotty and OLD the published data on the website are.

Thanks in advance,
-g

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