Seattle Schools and "Closure and Consolidation" - What Next?

From my post on the recent Work Session on the Budget, here are some more thoughts.

I've received several questions on one point - "Won't this make class sizes smaller if there are fewer students and fewer schools?" I wish but no. They will need to cram many more kids into fewer buildings. 

Caveats:

Do keep in mind that staff ABSOLUTELY already has their preliminary list of schools that would close and where the populations of those schools would go. Whether they have shared the list with the Board is doubtful. I have no uncertainty in my mind about that and a couple of readers have already put in their thoughts on that. 

Again, from my experience on the last closure and consolidation committee (I think I even have my big binder on that),  any time you put a name on a list, that community goes crazy. I hope the district thinks about how to handle that kind of upset/anger. And I hope the Board will be prepared for some packed Board meetings and vocal parents. 

I also believe they will only close/consolidate elementaries and maybe a K-8 (or split the K-8 out, keeping the elementary but moving the 6-8 students to a middle school).

I also believe that while they might make some kind of effort to have several criteria, I think it will boil down to three things: location (keeping in mind those transportation costs), building condition and population make-up (meaning, race).  The district has shown itself to want to be very open about their work on race and equity but I'm not sure that will necessarily help them win any lawsuit brought about by parents.

Staff might also present a Sophie's Choice - leave more schools open but make Option Schools back into neighborhood schools. Many Option Schools are in newer buildings so it would make it tempting to staff.  Given we already have a couple of Board members who don't like Option Schools , they might help push that idea along.

Against the backdrop of all of that, the district also proposes to be doing these items at the same time:

- Inclusion model for more Special Education students

- Returning of HCC 1-5 to their neighborhood schools (and this one means redrawing boundaries)

Yes, SPS is nothing if not ambitious. It's a heck of a lot of churn and I suspect parents who can go will throw up their hands and say, "We're out." 

Timeline

• Superintendent Brent Jones was fairly cagey about this point. From what I heard, this spring there will be "community meetings." How many there will be and what will be discussed was not mentioned. The vibe I got was that staff is extremely busy trying to figure out the budget and they don't have the bandwidth to do that and cover closure and consolidation. 

        But the cat's out of the bag so I hope parents show up in droves to these meetings this spring with      specific questions.  

• Then in school year 23-24, they WILL have the fleshed out plan to present at community meetings. Gotta say, there better be a LOT of them and spaced out (not all in a week or 10 days). As I recall from my days on the last closure committee, I believe there is a law that a school that is being proposed to be closed gets its own hearing.

• After that, in school year 24-25, they will have done ALL of this work:

- Figure out how many HCC students will be coming into any given neighborhood school,

- Figure out the reconfiguration of classrooms for rearranged schedules for Special Education students,

- Figure out what schools to close,

- Figure out where all the current students at those closed schools will go,

- Figure out the new boundaries, 

- Figure out a process for consolidation schools to welcome those new students and families.

Whiplash much?