SAP Draft Plan Released
We will NOT be discussing HCC pathways in this thread. We can have a separate thread on that issue but NOT here. Any comment with HCC discussion will be deleted.
end of update
Here's the draft plan. I haven't read it yet. Meetings start this week:
Five open house meetings are scheduled for families, students and staff about changes to the Student Assignment Plan (SAP) and high school boundaries.
District office staff will be available to discuss the 2018-19 SAP, including related updates to special education, school choice, and advanced learning opportunities in high schools. Visitors will also be able to review the proposed high school boundary scenarios.
Open house meetings:
end of update
Here's the draft plan. I haven't read it yet. Meetings start this week:
Five open house meetings are scheduled for families, students and staff about changes to the Student Assignment Plan (SAP) and high school boundaries.
District office staff will be available to discuss the 2018-19 SAP, including related updates to special education, school choice, and advanced learning opportunities in high schools. Visitors will also be able to review the proposed high school boundary scenarios.
Open house meetings:
- Mon., Oct. 23, 6:30 to 8 p.m., Eckstein Middle School, lunchroom, 3003 NE 75th St.
Interpreters: Spanish, Somali, Chinese and Amharic - Thurs., Oct. 26, 6:30 to 8 p.m., Ballard High School, commons, 1418 NW 65th St.,
Interpreters: Spanish, Somali, Chinese and Amharic. - Mon., Oct. 30, 6:30 to 8 p.m., McClure Middle School, gym, 1915 1st Ave. W.
Interpreters: Spanish, Somali, Chinese and Vietnamese. - Wed., Nov. 8, 6:30 to 8 p.m., Cleveland High School, lunchroom, 5511 15th Ave. S.
Interpreters: Spanish, Somali, Chinese and Vietnamese. - Thurs., Nov. 9, 6:30 to 8 p.m., West Seattle High School, lunchroom, 3000 California Ave. SW
Interpreters: Spanish, Somali, Chinese and Vietnamese.
At the end of the month, families and staff will receive an email invitation and survey to provide feedback on the three proposed high school boundary options. New high school boundaries will be implemented in 2019-20.Here are issues that some readers are reporting:
The top three potential scenarios can be found on the High School Boundary Task Force Recommendations webpage.
K-12 students with a choice assignment may transfer to their attendance area school for the next school year during Open Enrollment through May 31, as long as the student’s services needs can be met at that school and space is available.4.Another parent's comments:
>>>Students with a choice assignment can only switch back to their neighborhood school if SPACE IS AVAILABLE. That is a significant shift.
4 For attendance area schools, space avaiality depends on the seats available given the staffing cacpity at the school. To determine the total number of seats available at a grade level in a school, the district will multiply the target class sizes across each classroom given the number of teachers at each grade based on the staffing allocated by the Budget Office. For Option Schools, space availability is not limited to staffing capacity in the event that that there is still additional physical cacpity in the building. If demand increases and there is space available for consistent cohort sizes, more seats may be available.
(spelling mistakes part of draft document)
Just finished reading the plan.
One way or another downtown is going to remove all choice. They changed capacity to this mysterious "staffing capacity." Which basically means someone in enrollment planning is going to decide how many teachers are assigned to a school and that is the end of the story.
If there is physical space for 100 students and there are 100 students on the wait list but .... the budget folks did not forecast this, then there is no requirement for enrollment planning to respond to parent demand. What happened at Whitman and Steven's last year is now going to be applied to every school.
It used to be that schools got an initial allocation in Feb. Then post open enrollment that allocation was adjusted based on choices and demand. This is a way for staff to say ... we are going to do what we plan to do. If you don't like, leave the district. Based on this year's less that expected enrollment, it is reasonable to say that parents are doing exactly that.
Your siblings are now at two schools? You moved but thought since there is plenty of space of your old school, you could stay? Doesn't matter. You don't have any choice. You will be assigned.
Comments
What that rule means is that the JSCEE can set the staffing capacity to an arbitrarily low number, then refuse to enroll more student despite a waitlist, then say that the option schools aren't popular and need to be closed.
This has been foreshadowed for years but most option school parents simply refuse to believe this truth. Without a parent revolt and demands that the school board stand up for option schools, *option schools will go away.*
Keep in mind also that the existence of option schools is a key argument against more charter schools in Seattle. Saving and expanding option schools is urgent. Complacency gets us nowhere. Demand right now that option schools be protected, expanded, and made more inclusive and equitable, otherwise they'll be eliminated. The JSCEE staff are making it clear that's what they want to do. Will parents finally listen?
More Options
SSD Optimist
DisAPP
Robert Cruickshank, are you suggesting that Cleveland and the Center School will soon cease to be option schools?
Flummoxed
Haven't read the whole document yet - and need to go back to notes from 10 years ago...but my biggest concern that's been highlighted so far is the definition of capacity using staffing as an arbitrary metric. Hand's down. It essentially allows HQ to decide which schools succeed or fail based on how they allocate staffing vs. how much space is actually available at a school.
QA Parent
One way to think about any Student Assignment Plan is that the SAP is a power sharing agreement between the district and families. The Assignment plan is HOW members of the public are able to access the services funded by tax dollars. As such, there are lots of State level rules and regulations regarding how the SAP is created and there is a legal requirement that ALL SAPs are approved by a publicly-elected-board.
IMHO, this plan removes key elements from Board oversight and into the hands of staff. This "staffing capacity" is HOW all enrollment decisions will be made and any ability to influence "staffing capacity" is removed from both the public and the board oversight. It would be one thing if staffing capacity required board approval, but it doesn't.
Staffing capacity is determined by enrollment planning. Who is enrollment planning? Nobody knows. If you check the SPS website, all you get is an email. there is no information about who is in that department. The phone number goes to regular enrollment services but they can't transfer you to planning, the only give you the email address.
The 2009 SAP is a really sound document. It pretty evenly divides things between the district and families. This new document effectively says ...
* we have to assign choice seats at "options schools" via open enrollment, because there is no other way to assign students to these schools.
* we do NOT have to assign choice seats at "attendance area" schools, because we can assign attendance area students, so we are just not going to do that any longer.
Many students enroll at Nova during September, often when they get their schedules and find that their prior school is not going to be fit that year. When enrollment changed the rules so that you can only pick an option school during open enrollment, then high schools students were effectively "locked out" of choosing Nova as an option.
Rather than fix the open enrollment rules, they changed Nova to a "service school" because you can enroll in a "service school" at any time during the year.
As for Robert's suspicion about option school going away ... well ... the high school task force was asked to examine converting Cleveland to attendance area status.
The wording around physical space vs staffing capacity seems to be codifying what happened last year. They are codifying what was a pretty lousy process. Let's hope the Board pushes back on these changes. How are parents to plan when the document only covers one year??
-bleck
Flummoxed
Ultimately, it doesn't matter whether I'm right that the JSCEE has it out for option schools - as long as we ensure that the board passes, and the staff implements, policies to help option schools thrive (and that includes making them more equitable). If those strong policies are in place, then there'd be no way the JSCEE could ever undermine the option schools and these concerns would be rendered moot.
As kellie points out, however, it would be bad for the board to cede their power to the central staff by letting those staff make decisions about staffing and thus programs that should be handled by the board itself. Whether the board goes along will be a key test about whether this board is willing to do what it takes to support and protect great public schools in this city.
Flummoxed
Not sure if this deleted comment was referring to me or the staff or both. Of course, I know how interrelated these boundaries, SAP and programs are.
But I do not want this thread to devolve and so there will be no discussion of HCC.
School districts need to re-work assignment plans. It is pretty typical that this work starts with identifying the problem that they are trying to solve. What is the problem? What is the result that this plan is supposed to produce?
The were a number a benefits to the old 100% choice plan. However, if you were new to Seattle, didn't submit your paperwork on time, or changed your address, you had NO choice. You were simply assigned to whatever school had an empty seat. Likewise for the vast majority of sped families.
The plan had zero predictability. You never knew if you were going to get assigned to your school. One year, you needed to be three blocks from Steven's Elementary to get in. Middle and high school was a guessing game and many parts of town had NO reliable access to a school. It was not uncommon for siblings, even twins to be assigned to different schools.
There were many years of meetings to delineate the problem of predictability vs choice and the result was the 2009 SAP. What problem is trying to be solved with this new plan? Some staff have said these changes are necessary to prevent changes to staffing in October.
Well, that can't be correct. Last year, Whitman was capped at 600 students with 100 students on the wait list. Despite a promise to honor all the choice requests because there was plenty of space, these families were not admitted to Whitman. Staff asserted that this was necessary to protect the enrollment projections. So what happened?
This fall, Whitman is enrolled at 560 students, well below their projections. There was plenty of room to admit those families and more than likely the vast majority of those families left the district.
Opening and Closing of schools is under the authority of the board. This is part of state law - only the publicly elected board can determine the closure of a public asset.
This was debated endlessly during the closure-era, because only in Seattle is there a question of whether or not a building and school are the same thing. Everywhere else, there is absolute clarity that closing a building is closing a school.
Staff closed Middle College in West Seattle as part of program placement. It looked like a school closure. It felt like a school closure. For the staff and students at that school, there was really no distinction between closing their school and "a shift in program placement." However, none of the legally required processes for closing a school were followed and Middle College's doors were shut.
If this plan is approved, the process becomes even more opaque. Enrollment planning could simply plan for ZERO staff at a school and Viola! The school is gone. No process. No oversight. No recourse.
While that might seem a touch extreme, for the families at both Stevens and Whitman (and likely other schools) this is their reality. Stevens' has had a wait list every year for the last three years. Despite this, the school is shrinking by one homeroom each year. Steven's families testified that they feared this process could result in the eventual closure of their school.
This plan does not benefit families. I do not know if there is any benefit to anyone with this new plan. If anyone has any insight, please share.
Also the wording about twins is unclear. Reading between the lines I would guess that "twins" here means "siblings assigned to the same grade", and that if twins are assigned to different grades, the rules for siblings would be used but not the rules for twins. But it is not really spelled out and clarification is in order.
Irene
On the safe side, it would nearly impossible for the District to close Center School anytime in the next four years because of capacity constraints. The center school has physical space for 400 students, so there is plenty of room for any incoming students.
Downtown is strongly focused on creating a downtown high school of some sort. The earliest this could happen would be 2025. Between now and then Center School is the downtown high school and maintain some form of downtown high school is very important to that plan.
There is an outside chance that when or if a downtown comprehensive high school is created that Center School might be folded into that. However that is years away and for a plan that has no funding and I do not think will ever materialize.
Widgets
"If this plan is approved, the process becomes even more opaque. Enrollment planning could simply plan for ZERO staff at a school and Viola! The school is gone. No process. No oversight. No recourse. "
Thanks for summarizing, Kellie - that will be my talking point at the meetings and in an endless number of emails to the board.
QA Parent
1. Two things on p6:
a. "Current and new students will generally be assigned to their attendance area high school, as long as the school offers the services the student needs."
--They don't outline the assignment process if an attendance area school does not offer the services a student needs.
b. "Assignment to Ingraham depends on space available and tiebreakers"
--This case of "space available" has not been clarified as to whether it means physical space or staffing capacity. The footnote explaining what "space available" means (p3) only addresses attendance area schools and option schools.
2. There are three phrases they are using to refer to the period during which a student may make an enrollment change:
"during Open Enrollment through May 31"
"during the on-time Open Enrollment period" (with "through May 31" in strike-through text)
"during the on-time Open Enrollment through May 31"
--Is there a reason why these aren't consistent?
3. On the title page they have removed the word Transition from the title, but on p. 1 they refer to this as "this Student Assignment Transition Plan"
4. on p1 they refer to Lincoln as "an attendance area high school in Northwest Seattle." Since upcoming boundary changes will greatly impact NE Seattle this wording should change.
Good fit
Good fit
That's right, historically though those kids in programs have not gotten this information in time. They are excluded from the process until much later, although it affects large groups of kids and influences them directly. SPS makes program decisions after boundary decisions.
-backwards
N by NW
"K-8 students with a choice assignment who live outside of their assigned school’s walk zone and are not eligible for transportation may transfer to their attendance area school at any time, as long as the students’ service needs can be met and space is available."
So, for example, if you were attending Thornton Creek, but you lived outside the walk zone and you were not eligible for transportation (because you live outside of the Eckstein area and busing is only provided for students who live within the Eckstein area), you would be allowed to transfer to your attendance area school at any time as long as there was "space available." They should specify if this "space" is in their mythical staffing allotment mirage or actual physical space in the school building.
If they are making 2019/20 high school boundary decisions now, then they should also be approving a 2-year SAP transition plan, laying out what happens next year and then what changes happen the following year. As it stands, the current draft SAP for next year is CONTRARY TO assumptions underlying the proposed HS boundaries.
DisAPP
A) student leaves bryant to attend Sand Point elementary and two years later wants to return to bryant (their assigned neighborhood school), but that grade level is full.
B) student leaves Wedgwood to attend Decatur and the next year wants to go back to Wedgwood because HCC was too hard for their student, Wedgwood is full.
C) student who lives in the Eckstein service area (Wedgwood student) is attending Hale as a freshman and loves it, does not want to attend Roosevelt.
Titanic
Student A either stays at Sand Point or goes to their 2nd or 3rd (and so on) choice with space available. From this SAP:
"K-12 students with a choice assignment may transfer to their attendance area school for the next school year during Open Enrollment through May 31, as long as the student’s services needs can be met at that school and space is available."
Student B is an interesting one. The document doesn't address it as far as I can tell.
Student C continues at Hale *next year* but future years are unknown. This SAP says students with a choice assignment to an attendance area school that is not the student’s attendance area school "will automatically receive a continuing assignment to the same school, as long as the school offers the grade and services the student need." It does NOT say what happens to those students in 2019 when boundaries are redrawn. If I were Student C I would be worried about this.
The TC student a few posts above is in the same situation as Student A and could end up with no transportation anywhere.
Good fit
The entire drive to make Cleveland an attendance area school was to stabilize enrollment so that the school could plan for the future. For the last couple of years, Cleveland has opened in September with a waitlist and empty seats because staff are trying to boost enrollment at Rainier Beach. If Cleveland is guaranteed to move their waitlist to physical building capacity, then there's no reason to become an attendance area school. Center would also benefit from more predictability.
* or cacpity, which I think is sort of like covfefe.
I have sincere doubts that the district can pull off all of these changes without harmful disruption to many student's learning.
N by NW
Eric B: I wouldn't be so sure that Cleveland and Center School get more stabilization under this plan, because the whole "we'll fill Option Schools to physical not staffing capacity" guarantee seems to be written for K-5 and 6-8. If you read the footnote on page 3 of the proposed document, it says "if demand increases and there is space available for
consistent cohort sizes, more seats may be available." As Kellie often points out, "cohort" size is a thing in K-5 and 6-8 but not in high school. What matters is each child's master schedule. Leaving Nova aside (because its building does have space and the way it delivers classes is highly flexible) Center and Cleveland are still at the mercy of staffing capacity. Adding one or 150 students to either school would be possible physically, but that doesn't mean the district will allot the $$$ for the school administration to then add sections of mandatory subjects or desired electives. Which means Cleveland and Center will grow and shrink via centrally-determined staffing, not physical plant, considerations, despite the "promise" of this plan.
CapacityWonk
I would hope your reading of Option School enrollment is correct, but I doubt it. Capacity Wonk's reading seems more in line with recent history and cohort has flexible definitions. They are still basing this on staffing.
That said, I would like to highlight something about this "proposal to stabilize enrollment" for Cleveland. Enrollment Planning are the people who destabilized Cleveland's enrollment, in the first place. So a plan to fix a problem they created is not technically a solution.
All that is needed to fix Cleveland's enrollment is to enroll the students who apply, up to the 300 seats per grade that was promised when Cleveland was converted to option status in the first place.
The theoretical reason for strangling Cleveland and Franklin's enrollment has been to support Rainier Beach. However, there is ZERO evidence that has been presented that this strategy with measurable harm to two schools is creating a commensurate benefit for Beach. It would be very straightforward to either prove or disprove this theory.
Enrollment has the student ID numbers for all students. It would be straightforward for them to pull the ID numbers of students who applied to Cleveland and Franklin but were assigned to Beach. Just run a report that shows what percentage of those students attended Beach and which percentage left the district.
But based on overall attrition rates, I strongly suspect this plan is not working how they think. That is what is so distressing about this current SAP. There is no evidence that their staffing capacity plan works. There is lots of anecdotal evidence it does not work. The Whitman and Steven's examples are extreme and very measurable.
What is truly amazing about all of this. Traci Libros just made all of this work. Maybe they could get Traci to do a couple celebrity consulting weeks.
Unfortunately, implementing any one of the proposed boundary options now makes SAP changes by default, as all three of the HS boundary options presented include SAP-type changes that they assume will happen in 2019/20, although they are not being discussed now... Accepting one of the proposed boundary option "as is" means that decisions about service delivery in 2019/20 will be driven by enrollment staff, as opposed to whether or not the decisions make sense academically. We should not let these decisions go forward without transparency and discussion re: the academic service delivery issues that they will greatly impact.
I'm feeling like Chicken Little here, trying to get people to see that there are some huge SAP assumptions they are sneaking into the HS boundaries decision, but because these will affect the SAP a year from now instead of this one, it's all under the radar. Am I wrong here? Am I misinterpreting something? Kellie, anyone? Help?
DisAPP
DisAPP, you are not alone there. The boundaries proposed make big assumptions and are based on very thin data. The boundaries approved in a few months will drive many program placement decisions, in particular one that may not be named in this thread.
I agree - what a mess. I do not believe enrollment staff are "trying their best." They are trying to do what they want to do and I'm not believing it's a best effort.
I believe the task force is doing their best BUT enrollment staff are influencing them to support what staff wants. Both are stating that parents are clamoring for predictability. By asking for more predictability, I believe most families just wanted some reasonably advanced warning on where their children, who are currently enrolled in SPS would be going to school in the next few years. Not a guaranteed K-12 assignment regardless of neighborhood/walkability.
N by NW
So, what's weird about this SAP is that as far as I can tell it's an elaborate, shady attempt populate schools by self-fulfilling "staffing" predictions instead of populating schools by running good schools that people want to send their kids to. That's as nuts as trying to close the achievement gap by holding down the top instead of raising up the bottom. I think the commenters who say a surprising number of families don't like being treated this way and just leave the district. So their solution perpetuates the problem they're trying to fix
If families are not their customers, who are they trying to please?
Real Question
HCC Parent
Options matter
Titanic
I will say that everyone I spoke to seemed interested in the feedback, and I was glad that I went and gave them some. I encourage people to keep attending these meetings.
Every table was a silo on work that is deeply interconnected. The narrative I used centered on the following.
There are only two ways to run boundaries in a School district.
1) Reasonable boundaries, with uneven enrollment at schools and the use of programs to balance this out.
2) Right sized schools, with not-reasonable boundaries, where many students are bussed to a further school.
Most staff concurred with this basis. This scenario is so universal for all districts everywhere. Students and schools are just not conveniently located so someone has to go on a bus. This is why the State provides extra transpiration funding for Advanced Learning programs. You either have AL students volunteer to be bussed or you distribute the based on address and there are more total busses.
Every single boundary scenario is in group two. There are ZERO scenarios that represent group one. Group 2 means that there will need to be substantial changes to the SAP that include the elimination of pathways, because now every high school will be expect to do everything, despite the simple fact that State level funding does not pay for this.
When staff would assert that the decision to eliminate pathways has not been made and that board needs to make that decision, I would note that there are ZERO boundary maps that would align with that option.
Staff is only presenting one side of the story and the side they are presenting is both more expensive in operation costs and backs the board into a corner.
Staff answering questions in front of an audience, even if they are selectively answering based on comment cards submitted at the beginning, might help bring those silos together. As a parent, I want to hear other concerns as well. When the crowd around the table grew, it was next to impossible to hear. My guess is that many parents had similar questions that could have been answered more effectively with staff on a stage with a microphone. I'm not sure what was worse - the Lincoln meeting where parents were asked to sit around tables and accomplish nothing, or this past meeting where it was a noisy free for all.
beyond frustrated
Staff were not only asserting that the the decision to eliminate pathways has not been made, they were actively asserting that there would still be pathways in 2019, despite the exclusion of pathways in the proposed boundary maps. Either staff are lying and they know there likely won't be but don't have the courage to admit it, or they really think there will still be pathways, in which case they need to get their act together and work with their colleagues in other departments who seem to be convinced otherwise. Regardless, they need to all get on the same page soon. The board can't vote on any of this until there's a comprehensive proposal that's internally consistent. This is
crazy making
Challenge
Titanic
-musical chairs
Maybe I'm being overly pessimistic.
or not
DisAPP
In other news, up is down and black is white.
Thanks for the report. I was hopeful that your initial reading would turn out to be correct and that I was being cynical.
This anti-choice stance on the part of enrollment planning is very distressing. Nationwide there is an obsessive focus on vouchers and charter schools as the ONLY way to give families a choice. In many ways, Seattle has been a leader in promoting an alternative and a middle route.
Seattle's limited choice model is really different from the national conversation, because the choice model, gives families some flexibility while still ensuring that schools are staffed by trained professionals with access to a union and collective bargaining. In many ways, Seattle could be a model for other districts to adopt.
But instead, we are swiftly moving in this very rigid anti-choice direction, which will ultimately mean that families will start to push for charters and vouchers as the only way to get some choice. I have been pretty staunchly anti-charter, but I will likely soften that stance if all choice options are really removed.
The NSAP is far from perfect. However, I think many folks have lost sight of the simple fact that in recent memory during the 100% choice system, SPS was at 55% FRL, while Seattle itself had an average FRL of about 20%. The 20% has held pretty steady but SPS's FRL numbers have dropped steadily every year and we are well under 40% FRL as a district.
The most probably outcome of this rigid stance will be that those with choices will make them and leave the district.
I’m not very familiar with high schools here, but it seems they would have a very similar problem. Roosevelt and Hale are wildly different approaches. Either are probably better for different kids, but the district sets up a system where parents(and kids) can’t look at what is better for them, but are basically stuck depending on where they live.
NE Parent
Looking Forward
That student is in 11th grade when Lincoln HS opens. Is that kid then forcibly moved from Ingraham to Lincoln? Does it matter if Lincoln HS is made the North End DLI "pathway" school? My understanding is that even if they do name Lincoln a DLI pathway school, they won't REMOVE the DLI pathway to Ingraham.
Thanks for any light that can be shed on this mess.
Meantime, note that I was told that Michael Tolley this week stated in a staff meeting (unfortunately, no written presentations or notes to verify this in writing) that there would be no DLI pathway changes for next year's SAP. This says nothing about the 2019-20 SAP, which is when Lincoln HS comes online.
Concerned Parent
The following students will automatically receive a continuing assignment to the same school, as long as the school offers the grade and services the student needs:... [bullet #3]: Students with a choice assignment to an attendance area school that is not the student’s attendance area school.
I guess the big question mark is how any DLI pathway changes impact that. I doubt there's sufficient demand for two north-end DLI pathways, and I heard the rec is to move it to Lincoln. Move it from IHS, not add a new one. So then it's a matter of how to interpret the two components of the SAP statement above. On one hand, even if the DLI pathway moves, your child might be still be able to get their foreign language needs met at the choice school, so it seems like you'd have a case. On the other hand, they might say the "service" they need is DLI pathway services, and if those move, they might need to as well.
Sorry this isn't a particularly helpful answer, but it seems to be kind of a gray area. I'm not sure the downtown folks will have thought of this particular scenario, so you might mention it...or not, if you want to preserve your right to fight it if they decided the other way!
complexity