Enrollment Updates
Many, many of you - both here and at the Soup for Teachers Facebook page - have expressed concerns over the enrollment trends for next year.
It appears that 10+ schools that have been underenrolled, will continue to be underenrolled and will lose staff over that fact, also have waitlists. That does seem odd unless the goal is to force people to go to their neighborhood schools. But if a school has been underenrolled, doesn't it help to have it fully enrolled even if it's with people not in that neighborhood?
I wrote to the Board about this and heard back from Director Rick Burke:
I checked out the waitlist and found some interesting trends.
- popular programs like dual-language at Beacon Hill/JSIS/McDonald as well as Montessori at Daniel Bagley have significant kindergarten waitlists (interestingly, Graham Hill's Montessori program only has one student on the waitlist)
- Ballard/Hale/Chief Sealth have modest waitlists, there are large GenEd waitlists at Garfield, Franklin, Roosevelt, at 68, 50 and 69, respectively at 9th grade Gen Ed. Ingraham has large waitlists for GenEd and HCC: 26 and 44 students for the 9th grade. West Seattle High has 22 students on its 9th grade waitlist. Sealth and Rainier Beach have virtually no waitlists.
- Center School has a 9th grade waitlist of 8 students for 9th grade.
- Hazel Wolf has an astonishing 90 students on its kindergarten waitlist and 53 for first grade with 55 for 6th grade. Pathfinder has 35 students on its kindergarten waitlist. Salmon Bay has a waitlist in several grades (interestingly, a large one for 3rd grade). South Shore K-8 also has small waitlists in nearly every grade. STEM K-8 has large waitlist at most grades, with 57 students for kindergarten. Thornton Creek also has a large kindergarten waitlist. Jane Addams has a 6th grade waitlist of 25.
- New Schools - Cedar Park has very small waitlists, RESMS has its largest waitlist (13) at 6th grade. Meany has no waitlist.
- Thurgood Marshall has a waitlist of 26 for General Ed and 1 for HCC in kindergarten. Cascadia has no waitlist for kindergarten and small waitlists for a couple of other grades.
- Nothing too dramatic in middle school except Whitman has 26 on the list for 7th grade and 25 for 8th grade. The exception is Mercer with 35 for 6th grade.
It appears that 10+ schools that have been underenrolled, will continue to be underenrolled and will lose staff over that fact, also have waitlists. That does seem odd unless the goal is to force people to go to their neighborhood schools. But if a school has been underenrolled, doesn't it help to have it fully enrolled even if it's with people not in that neighborhood?
I wrote to the Board about this and heard back from Director Rick Burke:
Enrollment. I share many of the community's concerns. Staff is taking a deeper look at waitlists today and has been asked to provide updates and supporting data this week. I expect it to be a topic of discussion at Wed Board meeting.Also, reader Just FYI reports that there are updated waitlist numbers put up this morning.
I checked out the waitlist and found some interesting trends.
- popular programs like dual-language at Beacon Hill/JSIS/McDonald as well as Montessori at Daniel Bagley have significant kindergarten waitlists (interestingly, Graham Hill's Montessori program only has one student on the waitlist)
- Ballard/Hale/Chief Sealth have modest waitlists, there are large GenEd waitlists at Garfield, Franklin, Roosevelt, at 68, 50 and 69, respectively at 9th grade Gen Ed. Ingraham has large waitlists for GenEd and HCC: 26 and 44 students for the 9th grade. West Seattle High has 22 students on its 9th grade waitlist. Sealth and Rainier Beach have virtually no waitlists.
- Center School has a 9th grade waitlist of 8 students for 9th grade.
- Hazel Wolf has an astonishing 90 students on its kindergarten waitlist and 53 for first grade with 55 for 6th grade. Pathfinder has 35 students on its kindergarten waitlist. Salmon Bay has a waitlist in several grades (interestingly, a large one for 3rd grade). South Shore K-8 also has small waitlists in nearly every grade. STEM K-8 has large waitlist at most grades, with 57 students for kindergarten. Thornton Creek also has a large kindergarten waitlist. Jane Addams has a 6th grade waitlist of 25.
- New Schools - Cedar Park has very small waitlists, RESMS has its largest waitlist (13) at 6th grade. Meany has no waitlist.
- Thurgood Marshall has a waitlist of 26 for General Ed and 1 for HCC in kindergarten. Cascadia has no waitlist for kindergarten and small waitlists for a couple of other grades.
- Nothing too dramatic in middle school except Whitman has 26 on the list for 7th grade and 25 for 8th grade. The exception is Mercer with 35 for 6th grade.
Comments
A $50M budget gap is a big deal and I completely understand that downtown is under an amazing amount of pressure.
That said, now is not the time to be alienating families over something as basic as open enrollment. The tenants of what open enrollment is supposed to be were laid out clearly in the Student Assignment Plan. It was expected by the board and by families choice would be limited to space available assignments.
Everyone was disappointed when the capacity issues depleted the 10% set-asides at high school. People didn't like it, but folks understood that an over-crowded school should not be taking extra students.
This situation where schools with waitlists are losing teachers?? Schools with space are actively not allowing sibling to stay together??? It violates the core tenants of the choice plan.
What does "space available" actually mean? I'd push the Board to ask for more clarity on how Enrollment makes the determination - in a way that's more transparent to parents.
-same old
pointless exercise
Whitman
I beg to differ, from the 4/24 report, Washington has a total of 90 on the waitlist across the three grades. 39 total for 8th grade, 22 for 7th and 29 for 6th. I don't know of any student who selected WMS during open enrollment got assigned to WMS. Is it because the Meany numbers are lower than expected?
-Waiting for WMS
If the projections call for a cut in staff, there does seem to be a hell-bent determination to stick to that projected staffing level, no matter what the actual enrollment numbers are.
Elementary schools with enrollment of 20-30 students more than projections, with kids on the Wait List, still experience staff cuts. Instead, of retaining current staff levels split grade classes are created with 28/29 students per class.
And there is something wonky about the projections. Our elementary projections for next year predicted 20 students currently enrolled in K would not return to the school for 1st grade next year. What gives?
-StepJ
-Losing hope
Not Okay
Good for Rick. I think he and Pinkham should be able to show the district the merits in restoring good faith.
Whitman
eighth grade
One Guess
Not Okay
- waitlist watching.
I was told that waitlists should start moving this week, and more moves will happen about weekly after that. Another parent was told that the HS waitlists would only move if they could find a pair of waitlist #1s that could swap. For instance, if the #1 on the Sealth waitlist was currently assigned to Franklin, it would only move if the #1 on Franklin waitlist was assigned to Sealth so they could swap. Once that was done, there would be no more HS waitlist moves. That means that a single student could block up a lot of other students behind them. In the example above, if the remainder of the students on the Sealth waitlist were assigned to West Seattle, and everyone on the West Seattle waitlist was assigned to Sealth, they would let that one student block a few dozen from getting the assignment that they want. A more rational system would be to let that blocking student in to Sealth, since one student isn't going to make or break either school.
Pinkham and Harris are very interested in this issue, although they have not made any promises.
noun: tenet; plural noun: tenets
a principle or belief, especially one of the main principles of a religion or philosophy.
not tenant
Do I want split siblings? How do I get two students to two schools that start at the same time? Do I move my older student? If I am going to move the older student anyway, maybe I should go somewhere else?
- madrona mom
I trust your reporting of this issue and that is indeed not rational, particularly for high school. The high school waitlists move in pretty predictable ways and the waitlists tend to reflect the out of area population already at a school.
Moving the Ingraham waitlist might move 1 or 2 students from Rainier Beach or Cleveland, but the vast majority of the students would be moved out of extremely over-crowded Ballard and very over-crowded Roosevelt.
Whitman
Fix AL
During Tracy Libros's tenure, enrollment went to great lengths to keep siblings together and to move the waitlist whenever possible. Those days seems to be long gone.
The current waitlist make it clear that families are not the customer.
-WMS
Though I see why everyone is saying that it doesn't make sense to let one kid block the wait lists for many others who could be relieving capacity issues at their assigned schools, I actually agree with the district's procedure in this case. Otherwise, the district would essentially be telling kids in the AAs of wealthy, highly waitlisted schools (such as Ballard) that they are free to among other schools, but kids in the AAs of poorer, non-waitlisted schools (such as Rainier Beach) that they are not free to choose among other schools. I don't see how they could defend such a procedure.
--JvA
The "indefensible" situation you are describing is what is happening. The "block" on the wait list is Rainier Beach, not a "wealthy" school. The district does not want to let "too many" students leave the RB area. This is what is blocking all the high schools.
This policy then means that both Cleveland and Franklin are capped at artificially low numbers. This then extends to "options" like Nova and Center. And so forth.
Additionally, when Garfield was the most over-crowded school, there was a Garfield AA specific tie breaker. If you lived in the Garfield AA, you were one of the few folks that would get a choice seat, in order to free up space. This is the exact scenario you described. This tiebreaker went away when Garfield's capacity had normalized a bit.
Here is just a few quick highlights of the many times, the "trust us" card was used.
* We have a huge financial crisis. The only way to fix this is to close schools, trust us. Oops. Many of us lived through three rounds of school closures that never needed to happen based on bad data. (2003-2008)
* In the new Student Assignment Plan, we don't have enough capacity to promise seats for both attendance area students and the siblings of current students. While we can't promise a seat, enrollment will do everything in their power to grandfather siblings. (2009) Because of the great work of people like StepJ, that promise was kept for a few years.
* We need to open schools and we need to set the boundaries and feeder patterns now. Don't worry, we included an amendment that instructs staff to change the boundaries if the data changes. Trust us. (2012)
* Oops. Enrollment did not match projections and the middle school feeder patterns are incredibly uneven. We know the middle boundaries are based on old data. We can fix that via open enrollment, trust us. (2016)
Parent have good reasons to be skeptical when Enrollment says trust us. That trust can be rebuilt but it requires that someone actively attempts to rebuild public trust.
The lack of willingness to even admit that some schools have been artificially capped is not a good strategy to rebuild public trust.
-- curious cat
I actually would not agree that "Trust us, this is too complicated for you to bother your pretty little heads about, but we know what we're doing" would be a reasonable position even if there weren't many breaches of trust in the recent past. Enrollment darn well should be a procedure that is written down and followed and possible to explain.
DistrictWatcher
I do wonder what the best policy is when the the waitlist is less than a homeroom worth of kids. Letting them in means either pushing class sizes above the optimum level, or hiring staff and having some under-enrolled rooms. On the other side, it may leave the school(s) where they would have gone under-enrolled as well with a net cost to the district.
I'd like these kind of calculations day-lighted (i.e. net cost in extra staffing) as well as a policy that says what to do in each case.
- transparency
But I believe in many cases the bigger issue is workload and prioritizing staff interests over parent/student interests. What’s less work and less disruptive for the district? Allowing waitlisted students to go to school A even if there is room, if it would require moving a teacher from school B to School A, and all of the associated work involved? Or just telling parents to deal with it? The districts actions may be justified. Or it may be that everything can’t get done, and it’s Friday afternoon, so that’s the way it is. We all like our nights and weekends.
HP since 2012.
HP
It is not the weakest teachers it is those with the least seniority which are often the best teachers.
CCC
FNH
FNH
HP-It is not the weakest teachers it is those with the least seniority which are often the best teachers.CCC"
Not according to this recent study:
For their study, forthcoming in the Journal of Public Economics, the researchers looked at a set of some 200,000 student test scores linked to about 3,500 different teachers from an unnamed urban district. They analyzed those data using three different methods, each of which relies on different baseline assumptions about how to capture growth in teacher effectiveness as teachers gain experience.
Under all three of the models studied, the researchers found teachers' ability to improve student achievement persisted well beyond the three- to five-year mark. While the teachers did make the most progress during their first few years in the classroom, teachers improved their ability to boost student test scores on average by 40 percent between their 10th and their 30th year on the job, the study shows.
The improvements were seen in both reading and math teachers, but were stronger in mathematics.
Beyond Test Scores
What's more, teachers with more years of experience are better equipped to boost more than just test scores, according to a second new study, released as a working paper by the Washington-based National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research.
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/03/25/new-studies-find-that-for-teachers-experience.html
I guess the "obvious" isn't always obvious.
experienced teacher
I feel like the district has almost figured out how to handle the 2015 issue. Now if only they realized that the way they were handling that issue was causing new problems!
Thank you! I don't disagree with your statement. Hopefully this clarifies things.
Most people that do very technical work that requires a lot of "inside baseball type" knowledge tend to get defensive when someone outside of that technical field says "why don't you just ...."
So I do think it is understandable that Enrollment has the point of view that this is complex stuff and not everyone understands it. That said, I do not think complexity removes the obligation to attempt to explain it and make it more transparent. Washington State has the most aggressive Sunshine Laws regarding public disclosure in the country. As such, it would be prudent for any Washington State PUBLIC department to adopt the point the view that communicating information and that information clearly is a part of their job description.
For example, the Post Open Enrollment Information is "confusing." For some schools, the post open enrollment number is a very accurate reflection of the October 1 enrollment number. However, for a large number of schools, the post open enrollment number is misleading. Because these schools enroll most of their new students in August and September.
This is why Enrollment is so particular about the distinction between the Post Open Enrollment Number and the Enrollment Projection Number. Someone in Enrollment Planning takes the post open enrollment number and then projects it into an October 1 projection. Without this, there would be a huge temptation to reduce staff at schools with highly mobile populations.
So not all schools are the same. What do you do? It would be straightforward for Enrollment to simply note this information on the Post Open Enrollment numbers. Make a footnote that says, this information does not accurately reflect October 1 enrollment projections. There. Transparency.
If anyone then wanted to actually build confidence or trust, it would be pretty straightforward to classify schools based on last minute enrollment. You could make ranges. Less than 10, 10-30, 30-50, 50-100 students are enrolled in August and September. This would then create a "conversation" between Enrollment and the community that Enrollment serves.
I don't believe "don't worry your pretty little head about this" is an acceptable answer for any PUBLIC agency, particularly in this State.
I think you are correct and that "all of this" is about not displacing teachers in October. That said, it is my opinion that this practice actually INCREASES the number of teachers displaced in October.
Families that get their "choice school" are very likely to attend that school in September. Families that do not get their choice school are less likely to attend that school in September.
For the last several years, enrollment has fallen short of projections by hundreds of students. 100 students is about $1M dollars in the total budget. As such, 100 families that could have been assigned to a school but instead choose "no school," creates an even bigger problem of dollars that could have been in the system being removed.
Moreover, teachers have been removed at schools that met their enrollment projection to help ameliorate this total budget shortfall.
Waitlisting student at schools that have the desire, interest and capability to serve those students ... benefits no one and creates multiple unintended consequences.
Flip Herdon explained that it was important to protect the budget allocations and that waitlists were started once a school reached it budgeted number.
http://www.seattleschools.org/UserFiles/Servers/Server_543/File/District/Departments/Budget/2018%20Budget%20Development/17-18%20Allocations/allocations18.pdf
Thanks,
Tami
Reduce Anxiety
Here is are the numbers:
School Grade 9 Grade 10 Grade 11 Grade 12
Ballard 552 502 477 432
Ingraham 389 367 301 338
So, current total enrollments are Ballard (1963) and Ingraham (1395).
Total Capacity, per Capital Planning, are Ballard (1607) and Ingraham (1194).
Marmauset
just wow
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