Focus on the Southeast

There are no real or urgent capacity issues in the southeast part of the city. Consequently, a lot of the people there are puzzled by the changes proposed for that part of town and Director Patu is reported to be preparing an amendment to the Growth Boundary plan that will call for the deletion of any changes for the Southeast.

What is going on in the Southeast - and, more to the point, why?



The changes in elementary school attendance areas in the Southeast are not being driven by capacity issues, the projected growth of APP being the only possible capacity driver south of I-90. Many of the changes are being driven by the conversion of Dearborn Park to an option school. The decision to make Dearborn Park an option school is a top-down decision, not bottom-up. It only comes at the end of a long chain of rules and isn't very well connected to anything authentic. It goes like this:

• Affluent north-end families clamor for language immersion programs, and they naturally presume that everyone else wants exactly what they want. We can all acknowledge that language immersion is pretty far up on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs for elementary education, but the north-end is there and therefore so is the rest of the District.
• The District is concerned about equitable access to programs and services, so they feel obligated to create mirror language immersion programs in the south-end. Nevermind if people in the south-end are clamoring for language immersion or not, the District needs to do it for CYA and out of fear of charges of inequity, racism, classism, or whatever. So the south-end gets what the north-end wants whether the south-end wants it or not. Nevermind how racist and classist that attitude may be.
• The District has determined that it takes two elementary language immersion programs to feed a middle school program. That's just a rule they made. They already have one language immersion program at Beacon Hill in the Mercer service area, therefore they need another Mercer service area school to offer language immersion as well. Dearborn Park was chosen. It was a top-down decision.
• The District was pushed to explain why some language immersion schools are option schools and some are attendance area schools. The answer they invented (after the decisions were made) was this new rule: If the school is big enough to house both an English language program and a dual language program, then it would remain an attendance area school. If, however, the school is only big enough to house one program, language immersion, then it would be an option school. Dearborn Park, they determined, is not big enough to house two complete programs, so it must be an option school. No one asked anyone at Dearborn Park how they wanted their program designed or if they wanted to have one program or two.
• Once Dearborn Park is made an option school the Dearborn Park attendance area must be divided among its neighbors and, through a ripple effect, create changes in other attendance areas.

All of this, as you can see, was driven by top-down rules made without any connection to the actual situation. Top-down decision: The south-end must have language immersion - whether there's any demand for it or not. Top-down decision: Mercer must have a second language immersion elementary school - whether there is any demand for it or not. Top-down decision: Dearborn Park must be that school - without any consultation with the community. Incredible as it may seem, they did not hold even a single meeting. Really, no one has yet spoken with families in the area about this at all. Top-down decision: Dearborn Park must be all language immersion and an option school. Top-down decision: All of the south-end elementary schools must have their attendance areas altered to accommodate the deletion of the Dearborn Park attendance area.

Let's hope that Director Patu's amendment stops this nonsense.

The changes in the middle school feeder patterns in the South-end are derived in a similar fashion. It begins with APP and a lot of top-down decisions are made from there.

Here's a funny thing: APP in the north-end has grown to the point that Hamilton can't hold it. The solution is to open new middle schools and split APP into two or three smaller programs and place them close to where the students live. APP in the south-end has grown to the point that Washington can't hold it. The solution is to open a new middle school, but to continue to assign all of the APP students to Washington. Huh?

See, the problem is - again - equity. The bulk of the APP middle school students in the south-end live close to Meany, just as the bulk of APP students in the north-end live close to Eckstein. If the District placed APP at Meany, along with a few other elementary feeder schools, it would create a disproportionate situation in which the bulk of the affluent and White/Asian students would be at Meany and the bulk of the poor, Black/Latino students would be at Washington. Not cool. So, step one, APP can't be at Meany. The District decided to leave APP at Washington. I don't know if they ever really considered putting it anywhere else. If they had, the only other school that they might have chosen would have been Mercer. The other three are too far from the center of the population served. Mercer  is centrally located in the south-end and it is actually pretty accessible from the West Seattle bridge or the First Avenue Bridge. I don't know if they really considered Mercer, but perhaps they did and rejected it because it already is getting the language immersion program and it is the shining turnaround school in the south-end so they didn't want to lose half of the capacity to APP.

Once we have the decision, made at the top, to keep APP at Washington and only at Washington, all of the feeder patterns are derived from that. After APP is in the school, there is only room for three feeder elementary schools. Which ones? With Meany to the north, the obvious choices are the three southern-most in the service area: Muir, Thurgood Marshall, and Leschi. Thurgood Marshall is the elementary APP students, so this looks like it could work. One little problem to address: Washington is in the Gatzert attendance area. That can be fixed with the boundary re-draw. This was the original recommendation.

I honestly cannot remember why this wasn't the chosen solution. I think it had something to do with the Seattle U program at Gatzert that extended into Washington. The driving need to maintain the extension of that program - which for no clear reason couldn't be shifted to Meany - is what mucked up feeder patterns in the central region. The obvious solution would have been for the Seattle U folks to go to Meany instead of Washington, but that just couldn't be done. So Washington and Meany had to swap Gatzert for Leschi. 

Part of this original solution also had Mercer and Aki Kurose swapping feeder schools. Mercer got Wing Luke and Aki Kurose got Hawthorne. That was done to make MLK, and the light rail line, the boundary between Mercer and Aki. It was a bad idea for capacity, however, because Wing Luke is (or, rather, will be) a much bigger school and Mercer is already overcrowded. They could have and should have simply rejected this switch, but, no. Instead, when Hawthorne went back to Mercer it was Kimball that came out to make room. And Kimball went to Washington. That put an extra school in Washington, so Muir had to come out and go to Meany.

Do you see how messed up this is? If they had just gone with the original feeder pattern for Washington (Muir, Marshall, and Leschi) and had left the Mercer feeder pattern alone (keeps Hawthorne and Kimball, doesn't take Wing Luke), then everything would have been fine. Instead, we have chaos and the absurd service areas you see today.

Let's hope that Director Patu's amendment stops this nonsense.

At the high school level the only changes is the creation of an IB program at Rainier Beach. I don't know if the impetus for this program was top-down or bottom up. Let's be clear and candid. Rainier Beach has a recruitment problem. There are 1,600 SPS high school students in the attendance area and there are fewer than 500 enrolled at the school. What will it take to get families to choose to enroll their children at Rainier Beach? Is it IB?

I think we've determined that it isn't a performing arts focus. That was the District's last big idea for promoting the school and it failed horribly. Is IB going to do it? Hey, maybe. Last year, the first year that the IB program was real, Rainier Beach enrolled 146 freshmen (October count). All we know about the enrollment this year is that the school total is 484. We don't have a grade by grade breakdown, but using last year's breakdown and some interpolation it appears that the freshman class this year is a bit bigger than last year's, around 180 students. Think of it - about 330 of the 485 students at Beach are freshmen or sophomores. Those classes are each about twice the size of the junior and senior classes (rough numbers: 180, 150, 80, 80). If Rainier Beach continues to attract about thirty more freshmen each year, then the school will, in a couple years, have close to 800 students. And a couple years after that it could be full, with 1,100 students.

This rosy projection uses very squishy data and a terrible assumption that extrapolates a short-term change into the long-term, a practice I often sneer at, but it's not an impossible interpretation and it's as good as any other so early in the process. This may not be success, but this is what success would look like at this stage.

Let's remember what IB does for the school - even for the students who don't enroll in IB classes. It brings a different, more academically focused group of students into the school. Their presence shifts the aggregate culture of the school and gives confidence to other families who want a school with a stronger, more rigorous, academic focus. It raises the test scores and improves the school's reputation. It can have a positive affect on recruitment beyond the recruitment of the IB students.

Cleveland's enrollment is at 843, which is less than the 1,000 capacity, but it's certainly high enough to regard the STEM program a success for recruiting.

If more people choose Rainier Beach and Cleveland that will take a lot of pressure off Franklin and Garfield and it will make the whole situation a lot more manageable for the District and predictable for the community.